Laundry #05 - The Fuller Memorandum Charles Stross

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"Let me . . ." She reads out a string of digits and I read it back to her. "Yes, that's it. If you could just bring it home with you this evening?"

"Remind me again, who was it who didn't want work brought home?"

"That's different. This is me being lazy, not you overdoing it!"

I smile. "If you say so."

"Love you."

"You too. Bye."

AT SEVEN MINUTES PAST TWO, I HEAR FOOTSTEPS AND A squeak of wheels that stops outside my door. I pick up a pair of brown manila files I'm through with and stand. "Archive service?" I ask.

The man with the handcart is old and worn before his time. He wears a blue-gray boiler suit and a cloth cap that has seen better days; his skin is as parched as time-stained newsprint. He looks at me with the dumb, vacant eyes of a residual human resource. "Archive service," he mumbles.

"These are going back." I hand over the files, and he painstakingly inscribes their numbers on a battered plywood clipboard using a stub of pencil sellotaped to a length of string. "And I'm going with them."

He stares at me, unblinking. "Document number," he says.

I roll my eyes. "Give me that." Taking the clipboard I make up a shelf reference number and write it down in the next space, then copy it onto my left wrist with a pen. "See? I am a document. Take me."

"Document . . . number . . ." His eyes cross for a moment: "Come." He puts his hands to the handcart and begins to push it along, then glances back at me anxiously. "Come?"

For an RHR he's remarkably communicative. I tag along behind him as he finishes his round, collecting and distributing brown manila envelopes that smell of dust and long-forgotten secrets. We leave the department behind, heading for the service lifts at the back; Rita doesn't even raise her head to nod as I walk past.

The heavy freight lift takes forever to descend into the subbasement, creaking and clanking. The lights flicker with the harsh edge of fluorescent tubes on the verge of burnout, and the ventilation fans provide a background white buzz of noise that sets my teeth on edge. There's nobody and nothing down here except for storerooms and supply lockers: people visit, but only the dead stay.

Handcart man shuffles down a narrow passage lined with fire doors. Pausing before one, he produces an antiquated-looking key and unlocks a padlock-and-chain from around the crash bar. Then he pushes his cart through into a dimly lit space beyond.

"How do you re-lock that?" I ask him.

"Lock . . . at night," he mumbles, throwing a big switch like a circuit breaker that's mounted on the wall just inside the door.

We're in a narrow, long room with a couple of handcarts parked along one wall. The other side of the room is strange. There's a depression in the floor, and a hole in each of the narrow ends: rails run along the depression between the holes. Such is the wildly unusual scale of it all that it takes me several seconds to blink it back into the correct perspective and see that I'm standing on the platform of an underground railway station--a narrow-gauge system with tracks about sixty centimeters apart, and an electrified third rail. I hear a sullen rumbling from one of the tunnel mouths, and feel a warm breath of wind on my face, like the belch of a very small dragon. The original MailRail track only ran east to west, but extensions were planned back in the 1920s; I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find one here, for what else would commend this extremely boring sixties office block to the Laundry as a temporary headquarters?

I look at handcart man. "Can I ride this?" I ask.

Instead of answering, he pulls a second lever. I shrug. You'd think I'd have learned better than to ask zombies complex questions by now, wouldn't you?

The rumbling builds to a loud roar, and a remarkable object rolls out of the tunnel and screeches to a halt in the middle of the room.

It's a train, of course--three carriages, all motorized. But it's tiny. You could park it in my front hall. The roofs of the carriages barely rise waist-high, and they sport external handles. Handcart man shambles to the front carriage and hinges the roof right up. Not even breaking a sweat, he begins to load the files from his cart into a storage bin.

"Hey, what about"--I focus on the second carriage. It's got wire mesh sides, and what looks like a bench--"me?"

Handcart man lifts a box of files out of the front carriage, deposits it in his cart, and lowers the lid. Then he walks to the second carriage, lifts the roof, and looks at me expectantly.

"I was afraid you were going to say that," I mutter, and climb in. The wooden bench seat is about five centimeters above the track bed, and I have to lean backward as he drops the lid with a clang. The carriage is only big enough for a single passenger. It smells musty and dry, as if something died in here a long time ago.

Turning my head sideways, I watch as handcart man walks over to the big circuit breaker and yanks it down and up, down and up. It must be some kind of trackside signal, because a moment later I feel a motor vibrate under me, and the train starts to roll forward. I make myself lie down: it'd be a really great start to the mission to scrape my face off on the tunnel roof. And a moment later I'm off, rattling feetfirst into the darkness under London, on a false-flag mission . . .

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME I'M FALLING FEETFIRST INTO A PIECE of railway history, another part of the plot is unfolding. Let me try to reconstruct it for you:

A red-haired woman holding a violin case is making her way along a busy high street in London. Wearing understated trousers and a slightly dated Issey Miyake top, sensible shoes, and a leather bag that's showing its age, she could be a college lecturer or a musician on her way to practice: without the interview suit, nobody's going to mistake her for an auction house employee or a civil servant. Which shows how deceptive appearances can be.

Kids and shoppers and office workers in suits and shop staff in uniforms move around her; she threads her way between them, not looking in shop windows or diverting her attention from the destination in hand. Here's a side street, and she turns the corner wide--avoiding a baby buggy, its owner nattering on her mobile--and strides along it before turning into another, wider street at a corner where a bland seventies office rises six stories above the pavement.

The office has glass doors and a reception desk fronting an austere atrium; a bank of lifts behind it promises a rapid ascent into crowded beige cubicle heaven. The woman approaches reception, and holds up an ID card of some sort. The guard nods, signs her in, then waves her on to the lift bank on the right. She could be a session musician turning up at one of the TV production companies listed on the wall panel beside the reception desk, or a member of staff on her way back from a lunchtime lesson.

But she's not.

The lift control panel shows five numbered floors. As the door slides closed, the woman pushes the third-floor button, then first floor (twice), then the fourth floor. The lift begins to move. The illuminated floor display tracks it up from ground to first, second, third--and it goes out. Then, safely stranded between indicated floors, the doors open.

There are no cubicles here: only rooms with frosted glass doors that lock shut, and red security lights to warn against intrusion. Some of the rooms are offices, and some of them are laboratories, although the experiments that are conducted in them require little equipment more exotic than desktop computers and hand-wired electronic circuitry.

The red-haired woman makes her way through the building with ease born of familiarity, until she finds room 505. She knocks on the door. "Come in," the occupant calls, his voice muffled somewhat by the wood.

Mo opens the door wide. "Dr. Mike," she says, smiling.

"Mo?" He has a large head for his average-sized torso: brown hair fighting a hard-bitten retreat, bound in a ponytail; his eyebrows, owlishly peaked, rise quizzically at her approach. "Good to see you!"

"It's been too long." She walks in and they embrace briefly. "Are you busy?"

"Not immediately, no." His desk tells a different story, piled high in untidy snowdrifts of paper--there's a laser printer on a table in one corner, and a heavy-duty shredder right below it--with a coffee mug balanced atop one particularly steep pile. The mug reads: DURING OFF HOURS TRAINS STOP HERE. There's a bookcase beside the desk, crammed full of phrase books and travel guides, except for one shelf, which is occupied by a tiny Z-gauge model railway layout. "Were you passing through or can I be of service in some way?"

"I was hoping to talk to you," she confesses. "About . . ." She shrugs. "Mind if I sit down?"

"It's the cross-section growth coefficient, isn't it?" he asks, and one of his eyebrows tries to climb even farther. "Yes, yes, make yourself comfortable. Everyone has been asking about it this week." He sighs, then backs towards his own chair, bearish on his short legs.

"I got an edited, probably garbled, version of it from Andy last week," she explains. "The original paper isn't on the intranet so I thought I'd ask you about it." She nods at the door. "In person."

"Yes . . . very wise." His expression relaxes moment by moment.

"The scholars of night have been busy."

"Word leaked." Saturnine, he rests one hand on a graph-ruled notepad. "Or so I gather from Angleton."

"That's interesting." Mo rests her violin against the side of her chair and crosses her legs. "He's missing too, you know."

"That's very interesting!" Now Ford's expression lightens. "The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things."

Mo nods. "Footwear and naval architecture I know, but I never could get my head around why you'd put wax in the ceiling. Some kind of late-Victorian loft-space insulation?"

"No, it's--" Ford stops. "Okay, you won that round. Is this about the paper, or the leak?"

"The paper." She leans forward expectantly.

"The first rule of paper is, there is no paper--well no, not exactly, but it's not the kind of result I could punt at Nature, is it?"

"Right. So who reviewed it?"

Ford nods. "That's the right question. Whose hat are you wearing?" Mo's eyes go very cold. "There's a little girl in Amsterdam whose parents don't have much time for hair-splitting right now. Not that I'm accusing you of playing games, but I need to know. See, I'm conducting some research in applied epistemology. It would be rather unfortunate if you made a mistake in your logic and the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh have gotten themselves worked up over nothing."

"The Brotherhood? I say, are they still going?" He meets her cold stare with one of his own. "That is simply not on. I rather thought we'd put a stop to their antics in Afghanistan a few years ago."

"They're a broad franchise: they've got any number of fronts." She makes a gesture of dismissal. "Whoever. I'm looking into this on my own initiative. Do you have a draft I can see?"

"I think I could manage that." He begins to hunt through the papers on his desk. "Ah, here." He passes her three pages, held together by a paper clip.

Mo peers at the top page. "Wait, I can't read--"

"Ah. Just a moment." Ford waves his left hand across the paper and mutters something unintelligible under his breath.

Mo blinks. "Was that entirely safe?"

He grins. "No."

"I, uh, see." She peers at the abstract. "That's interesting. Let me paraphrase. You've tried to quantify memetic transmission effects among a population exposed to class three abominations and find . . . belief in them spreads? And it's a power function?"

He nods. "You must understand, previous models all seem to have looked at how possession spreads through a sparse network, like classical epidemiological studies of smallpox transmission, for example. But that's flawed: if you posit an uncontrolled outbreak, then people can see their neighbors, random strangers, being possessed. And that in turn weakens the observer-mediated grid ultrastructure, making it easier for the preta to tunnel into our reality. It's a feedback loop: the more people succumb, the weaker everyone else's resistance becomes. I modeled it using linear programming and the results are, well, they speak for themselves."

"And the closer we come to the Transient Weak Anomaly the more outbreaks we're going to see, and the--it contributes to the strength of the TWA?" She looks at him sharply.

"Substantially, yes." Dr. Mike shuffles uncomfortably in his chair.

"Well, shit." She folds the paper neatly and slides it into her handbag. "And here I was hoping Andy had gotten the wrong end of the stick."

"Second-order effects are always gonna getcha." He shrugs apologetically. "I don't know why nobody looked into it from this angle before."

"Not your problem, not my problem."

"Says Wernher von Braun, yes, and who says satire is dead?"

"Tom Lehrer. Or maybe Buddy Holly."

"Right. But you said something that interests me strangely. How did the Black Brotherhood--or whoever wants us to think they're the BBs--get the news?"

"That's what a lot of people are asking themselves right now." She gives him a peculiar look. "It made quite a stir, unfortunately. Lots of wagging tongues. Unfortunately Oscar-Oscar are drawing blanks and they can't Audit the entire organization--at least not yet. We'll have to examine the second-order consequences if the cultists learn they've got a turbocharger, though. If you can come up with anything . . ."

"Angleton would be the one to talk to about that," he says slyly. "After all, he's the head of the Counter-Possession Unit."

"Angleton's missing--" Mo freezes.

For a moment they sit in silence. Then Dr. Mike raises one preposterous eyebrow. "Are you certain of that?"

I'M GLAD I'M NOT CLAUSTROPHOBIC.

Well, I'm not very claustrophobic. Lying on my back in a coffin-sized railway carriage, rattling down a steep incline in a tunnel less than a meter in diameter that was built in the 1920s is not my idea of a nice relaxing way to spend an afternoon. Especially knowing that the station staff are zombies and I'm barreling headfirst into the depths of a high security government installation with only my warrant card to speak for me, on a mission of somewhat questionable legality.

Pull yourself together, Bob. You've been in darker holes.

Yes, but back then Angleton at least had the good grace to tell me what the fuck I was supposed to be doing! This time around it's just I want you to be my tethered goat. That and the 440 volt DC rail fifteen centimeters below my spine give me a tingling sensation like my balls want to climb right up my throat and hide. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that there's a back door into the stacks, or that it's a hinky little narrow-gauge tube system constructed by a Quango and forgotten by everyone except train spotters, but to find myself actually riding it . . . that's something else.

Angleton had the decency to scribble me a written order, and a good thing too, otherwise I would have thrown a strop. The librarians don't appreciate unannounced visitors, much less informal withdrawals, and like so many of our more eccentric outposts they have their own inimitable and unspeakable ways of dealing with vandals and intruders. If they catch me, a signed order from a DSS ought to make them pause long enough to give me a fair hearing before they rip my lungs out; but, really and truly, it is usually best to just put in a request and wait for the little man with the cart.

I try not to think too hard about everything that can go wrong with Angleton's plan. Instead, I lie back and think of libraries.

The Laundry keeps its archive stacks in a former tube tunnel. It was originally going to be a station, but during World War Two it was converted into an emergency bunker and in the end they never got around to connecting it up to the underground network. There are six levels rather than the usual three, two levels built into each half of a cylindrical tunnel eight meters in diameter and nearly a third of a kilometer long. That makes for a lot of shelves--not quite in the same league as the British Library, but close. And it's not just books that occupy the stacks. We store microfiche cards in binders, row after row of them, and there are rooms full of filing cabinets full of CD-ROMs. There's a lot of stuff down here, a lot of moldering secrets and fatal lies: a complete transcript of every numbers channel transmitted since 1932, the last words of every spy hanged during the Second World War, every sermon preached by a minister in the Church of Night--our minister--before his followers found out and tore him toe from nail . . .

The train tilts so that my feet are raised, and the clattering rush begins to slow. I've only been here for three or four minutes but it feels like hours in the roaring dark. I cross my arms around my body, hugging myself, and try not to think about premature burials. Instead I try to remember more secrets and lies: such as the recordings of every spy and defector executed by Abu Nidal. (Famously paranoid, if he suspected a recruit of spying he had them buried in a coffin, fed through a tube while being interrogated: after which they would be executed by a bullet fired down the same pipe. I gather he killed more of his own followers than any hostile power.) The last confessions of every member of the Green Hand Sect arrested and interrogated by the Kripo in Saxony in the late 1930s. (Which led to secret and unsanctioned executions--which the Occupying Powers declined to investigate, after a brief, horrified review of the Nazi-era records.) There is even a sealed box of DVDs containing high-resolution scans of the mechanical blueprints from the Atrocity Archives. (That one was my own contribution to the stacks, I'm afraid.)

The carriage squeals to a halt. A few seconds later, I hear the clatter of lids being raised. I take this as my cue and, bracing myself, I push against the roof.

I sit up to find myself in another room, this time with a rounded tunnel-like roof and raw brick walls. It's dimly lit by red lights set deep in shielded sockets; it smells of corruption and memories. A pair of residual human resources are lethargically unloading the wagon in front of me. I lever myself off the bench seat and clamber over the side of the carriage, trying not to bash my head on the low, curving ceiling. There are human-sized doors at either end of the platform, but I don't dare try them at random--I'm pushing my luck just by being here. Instead, I approach one of the shambling human figures, and thrust my ink-stained forearm under what's left of its rotting nose. "Document," I say, stabbing my opposing index finger at the numbers: "File me!"

Leathery fingers close lightly around my wrist and tug me towards a half-loaded handcart. I grab onto the edge of it and the hand drops away; I suppress a shudder. (One of the office unions is currently taking HR to court over the use of residuals, claiming it's a violation of their human rights; HR's argument is that once you're dead you have no rights to violate, but the union's lawyers have said that if they lose the case they'll bring a counter-suit for interfering with corpses--either that, or they'll demand equal pay for the undead.)

After a couple of minutes, one of the working stiffs shuffles over to a control board on one wall and starts pulling handles. With a grumbling buzz of motors and the screech of steel wheels on rails, the mail train rolls forward into the next tunnel mouth, on its way back to the realm of worms and darkness. Then they take their handcarts and shamble slowly towards the farthest door.

I walk alongside, resting one hand on the file cart at all times. Doors open and close. Using my free hand, I produce my warrant card and orders, then hold them clenched before me. We walk down whitewashed brick-lined passages like the catacombs beneath a recondite order's monastery, dimly lit by yellowing bulbs. A cool breeze blows endlessly towards my face, into the depths of the MailRail tunnels.

A twist in the passage brings us to another pair of riveted iron doors, painted battleship gray. It's probably their original wartime livery. I'm close to lost by this point, for I've never been in the lower depths of the stacks before: all my dealings have been with the front desk staff on the upper levels. The lead zombie places a claw-fingered hand on the door and pushes, seemingly effortlessly. The door swings open onto a different shade of darkness, a nocturnal gloom that raises gooseflesh on my neck. I tighten my grip on the cart and swear at myself silently. I left my ward with Mo, didn't I? I hastily raise my warrant card and orders and grip them with my teeth, then fumble for the NecronomiPod with my free hand. Should have replaced it . . .

As my bearer walks forward I thumb-tap the all-seeing eye into view and bring the phone's camera to bear. What I see does not fill me with joy: the dark on the other side of the portal isn't just due to an absence of light, it's the result of a very powerful ward. Being of a nasty and suspicious disposition it strikes me as likely that it's part of a security cordon--after all, this is a secret document repository I'm trying to break into, isn't it? And I know what I'd plant just inside the back door if I was in charge of security: Shelob, or a good emulation thereof, the better to trap intruders in my sticky web.

It's time to break from my assigned shelf space so, not entirely regretfully, I let go of the document cart. Before the dead man walking can take me in hand again, I remove the papers from my mouth, then lick the ink on my wrist and frantically rub it on my jacket. "Not a document!" I crow, showing my smeary skin to the walking corpse. "No need to push, file, stamp, index, brief, debrief, or number me!"

It stands still for a moment, rocking gently on the balls of its feet, and I can almost see the exception handler triggering in the buggy necrosymbolic script that animates and guides its behavior. A sudden thought strikes me and I raise my warrant card. "Command override!" I bark. "Command override!"

The zombie freezes again, its claws centimeters from my throat. "Overrr-ride," it creaks. "Identify authorization." The other zombie, standing behind it, hisses like a truck's air brake.

"In the name of the Counter-Possession Unit, on the official business of Her Majesty's Occult Service, I override you," I say, very slowly. A harsh blue light from my warrant card shows me more of its death mask than I have any desire to remember. The next bit is hard: my Enochian is rusty, and I'm told I have an abominable accent, but I manage to pull together the ritual phrases I need. These residual human resources are minimally script-able, as long as you've got the access permissions and know what you're doing. The consequences of getting it wrong are admittedly drastic, but I find that the prospect of a syntax error getting your brains gnawed out through a hole in your skull concentrates the mind wonderfully. (If only we could convince Microsoft to port Windows to run on zombies--although knowing how government IT sector outsourcing is run, that's probably redundant.) "Accept new program parameters. Subroutine start . . ." Or words to that effect, in questionable medieval cod-Latin gibberspeak.

After fifteen minutes of chanting I'm cold with sweat and shaking with tension. My audience are displaying no signs of acquiring a taste for pate de foie programmer, which is good, but if security is paranoid enough they'll be flagged as overdue any minute now. "End subroutine, amen," I intone. The zombies stand where they are. Oops, have I crashed them? I pull out my phone and fire up its poxy excuse for a personal ward, then stick it in my jacket's breast pocket. There's only one way to find out if this is going to work, isn't there? I snap my fingers. "What are you waiting for?" I ask, reaching into one of my pockets again. "Let's go to work."

The Hand of Glory has seen better days--the thumb is worn right down to the base of the big joint, and only two of the fingers still have unburned knuckles--but it'll have to do. "Do we have ignition, do we have fucking ignition," I snarl under my breath, and a faint blue glow like a guttering candle rises from each of the stumps. I climb into one of the document carts, carefully holding on to the waxy abomination, and the residual human resource gives me a tentative shove towards the dark.

There's a tunnel out of nightmares in the library in the underside of the world. I'm not sure I can quite describe what happens in there: cold air, moist, the dankness and silence of the crypt broken only by the squeaking of the overloaded wheels of my cart. A sense of being watched, of a mindless and terrible focus sweeping across me, averted by the skin of the Hand of Glory's burning fingertips. A rigor fit to still the heart of heroes, and only the faint pulsing ward-heart of my phone to bring me through it with QRS complex intact. There is a reason they use residual human resources to run the files to and from the MailRail system: you don't need to be dead to work here, but it really helps.

I'm in the darkness for only ten or fifteen seconds, but when I come out I am in soul-deep pain, my heart pounding and my skin clammy, as if on the edge of a heart attack. Everything is gray and grainy and there is a buzzing in my ears, as of a monstrous swarm of flies. It disperses slowly as the light returns.

I blink, trying to get a grip, and I realize that the handcart has stopped moving. Shivering, I sit up and somehow slither over the edge of the cart without tipping the thing over. There's carpet on the floor, thin, beige, institutional--I'm back in the land of the living. I look round. There's a wooden table, three doors, a bunch of battered filing cabinets, and another door through which the mailmen are disappearing--black painted wood, with a motto engraved above the lintel: ABANDON HOPE. Trying to remember what I actually saw in there sends my mind skittering around the inside of my skull like a frightened mouse, so I give up. I'm still clutching the Hand of Glory. I hold it up to look at the flames. They've burned down deep, and there's little left but calcined bones. Regretfully, I blow them out one by one, then dispose of the relic in the recycling bin at one side of the table.

No mailmen, but no librarians either. It's all very Back Office, just as Angleton described it. I head for the nearest door, just as it opens in front of me.

"Hey--"

I blink. "Hello?" I ask.

"You're not supposed to be here," he says, annoyed if not outright cross. "Visitors are restricted to levels five and six only. You could do yourself a mischief, wandering around the subbasement!" In his shirt and tie and M&S suit he's like an intrusion from another, more banal, universe. I could kiss him just for existing, but I'm not out of the woods yet.

"Sorry," I say contritely. "I was sent to ask for a new document that's supposed to have come in this morning . . . ?"

"Well, you'd better come with me, then. Let me see your ID, please."

I show him my warrant card and he nods. "All right. What is it you're after?"

"A file." I show him the slip of paper on which I've written down Mo's document reference. "It's new, it should have come in this morning."

"Follow me." He leads me through a door, to a lift, up four levels and along a corridor to a waiting room with a desk and half a dozen cheap powder-blue chairs: I vaguely recognize it from a previous visit. "Give me that and wait here."

I sit down and wait. Ten minutes later he's back, frowning. "Are you sure this is right?" he asks.

Annoyed, I think back. "Yes," I say. I read the number back to Mo, didn't I? "It's a new file, deposited last night."

"Well, it's not here yet." He shrugs. "It may still be waiting to be allocated a shelf, you know. That happens sometimes, if adding a new file triggers a shelf overflow."

"Oh." Mo won't be happy, I guess, but it establishes my cover. "Well, can you flag it for me when it comes in?"

"Certainly. If you can show me your card again?" I do so, and he takes a note of my name and departmental assignment. "Okay, Mr. Howard, I'll send you an email when the file comes into stock. Is that everything?"

"Yes, thanks, you've been very helpful." I smile. He turns to go. "Er, can you remind me the way out . . . ?"

He waves a hand at one of the doors. "Go down there, second door on the left, you can't miss it." Then he leaves.

THE SECOND DOOR ON THE LEFT OPENS ONTO A SMOOTH-FLOORED tunnel lined in white glazed tiles and illuminated by overhead fluorescent tubes of a kind that are sufficiently familiar that, when I reach the end of the tunnel and step through the gray metal door (which locks behind me with a muffled click) I am unsurprised to find myself in a passage between two tube platforms.

Half an hour and a change of line later, I swipe my Oyster card and surface, blinking at the afternoon sun. I pat the inside pocket where I secreted the sheaf of papers that Angleton gave me. And then I head back to my office in the New Annexe, where I very pointedly dial open my secure document safe and install those papers, then lock it and go home, secure in the knowledge of the first half of a job well done.

(Like I said: fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake.)

11.

CRIME SCENES

I DON'T FUNCTION WELL IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING. I sleep like a log, and I have difficulty pulling my wits about me if something wakes me in the pre-dawn dark.

So it takes me a few seconds to sit up and grab the bedside phone when it begins to snarl for attention. I fumble the handset close to my face: "Whuuu--" I manage to drone, thinking, If this is a telesales call, I'll plead justifiable homicide, as Mo spasms violently in a twist of the duvet and rolls over, pulling the bedding off me.

"Bob." I know that voice. It's--"Jo here. Code Blue. How soon can you be ready for a pickup?"

I am abruptly awake in an icy-cold drench of sweat. "Five minutes," I croak. "What's up?"

"I want you in here stat, and I'm sending a car. Be ready in five minutes." She sounds uncertain . . . afraid? "This line isn't secure, so save your questions."

"Okay." The phrase this had better be good doesn't even reach my larynx: declaring Code Blue is the sort of thing that attracts the Auditors' attention. "Bye." I put the phone down.

"What was that?" says Mo.

"That was a Code Blue." I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and fish for yesterday's discarded socks. "There's a car calling for me in five minutes."

"Shit . . ." Mo rolls over the other way and buries her face in a pillow. "Am I wanted?" Her voice, muffled, trails away.

"Just me." I paw through an open drawer for pants. "It's Jo Sullivan. At four in the morning."

"She's with Oscar-Oscar, isn't she?"

"Yup." Pants: on. Tee shirt: on. Trousers: next in queue.

"You'd better go." She sounds serious. "Phone me the instant you hear something."

I glance at the alarm. "It's twenty to five."

"I don't mind." She pulls the bedding into shape. "Take care."

"And you," I say, as I head downstairs, carrying my holstered pistol.

I'm standing in the front hall when blue and red strobes light up the window glass above the door. I open it in the face of a cop. "Mr. Howard?" she asks.

"That's me." I hold up my warrant card and her eyes age a little.

"Come with me, please," she says, and opens the rear door for me. I strap myself in and we're off for another strobe-lit taxi ride through the wilds of South London, speeding alarmingly down narrow shuttered streets and careening around roundabouts in the gray pre-dawn light until, after a surprisingly short time, we pull up outside the staff entrance to a certain store.

The door is open. Jo is waiting for me. One look at her face tells me it's bad. Angleton warned me: This is where it starts. I tense. "What's happened?" I ask.

"Come this way." Jo leads me up the stairwell. The lights are on, which is abnormal, and I hear footsteps--not the steady shuffle of the night staff, but boots and raised voices. Something in the air makes me think of a kicked anthill.

We head past reception where a couple of blue-suited security men are standing guard over a stapler and six paper clips, then back along the corridor past Iris's corner office, then round the bend to--

"Fuck," I say, unable to contain myself. My office door is closed. But I can see the interior, because there's a gigantic hole in the door, as if someone hit it with a wrecking ball. (Except a wrecking ball would leave rough jagged edges of splintered wood, while the rim of this particular hole looks oddly melted.) The interior isn't much better; an avalanche of paper and scraps of broken metal are strewn across half an overturned desk. A thin blue glow clings patchily to some of the wreckage, fading slowly even as I watch. "What happened?"

"Am hoping you tell us." It's Boris, bags under his eyes and an expression as dark as midnight on the winter solstice. When did he get back? Wasn't he doing something overseas connected with BLOODY BARON . . . ?

"What have you done, Bob?" Jo grabs my left elbow. "First a civilian FATACC, now this. What are you into?"

I blink stupidly at the destruction. "My secure document safe, is it . . . ?"

She shakes her head. "We won't know until we go inside. It's still active." I feel a thin prickling on the back of my neck. Demonic intruders have been at work, summoned to retrieve something. Angleton was right, I realize.

"What did you have in your safe?"

"I'm not sure you're cleared--"

Boris clears his throat. "Is cleared, Bob. I will clear her. What was in safe? What attracted attention of burglars in night?"

I squint through the hole in the door. "I had documents relating to several codeword projects in there," I say. "The stacks can probably reconstruct my withdrawal record, and once it's safe to go in there we can work out what is missing."

"Bob, you went to the archives in person yesterday." Jo tightens her grip on my elbow, painfully tight. "What did you withdraw most recently? Tell us!"

Truth and consequences time. "I asked for a copy of the Fuller Memorandum," I tell her, which is entirely true and correct: "I was following up something Angleton told me to do a while ago." Which is also entirely correct, and the most misleading thing I've said in front of witnesses all year.

"Fuller Memo--" I see a flicker of recognition on Boris's face. "Tell me, when you go home last night, is Fuller Memorandum in safe?"

I nod. I don't trust my tongue at this point because, as the man who used to be president said, it all depends on what you mean by the word "is."

Jo stares at Boris. "What classification level are we talking about?" she asks.

Boris doesn't answer at once. He's staring at me, and if looks could kill, I'd be a tiny pile of ash right now. "Does Angleton say you are to the memorandum read?" he asks.

"Yup. Took me a while to track it down," I extemporize. "So I left it in the safe overnight; I was going to look at it today." All of which is truthful enough that I will happily repeat it in front of an Audit Panel, knowing that if I tell a lie in front of them the blood will boil in my veins and I won't die--

Boris looks at Jo and nods, minutely. "Am thanking you for calling me. This is mess."

"What was in the memo that's so red-hot?" I ask, pushing my luck, because somewhere in all the fuss of expediting Angleton's little scheme--taking the forgery he'd prepared and inserting it into the archives, then withdrawing it and planting the bait in my office safe--I hadn't gotten round to asking him just what the original was about.

"Memorandum is control binding scripture for asset called Eater of Souls," Boris says, and strangely he refuses to meet my eyes. "Codeword is TEAPOT. Consequences of loss--unspeakable."

"Oh, shit." I swear with feeling, because I'm not totally stupid: I worked out who Teapot was some time ago. I didn't realize the Fuller Memorandum was his control document, though. The control document is the source code and activation signature for the geas that binds the entity called Teapot--the thing that over an eighty-year span became Angleton. It doesn't even matter that our safe-breakers have stolen a ringer--at least, I assume Angleton gave me a ringer--the fact that they knew what to look for in the first place is really bad news.

"You'd better come with me," says Jo, and I suddenly notice that she's shifted her grip to my forearm and she's got fingers like handcuffs. "Form R60 time, Bob. And this time it's not just a FATACC enquiry. As soon as my people have gone over the incident scene with a fine-toothed comb this will be going before the Auditors. I'm sorry."

I DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT PS200, AND DO NOT BUY Piccadilly Circus. I don't go to jail, either--not yet--but by the middle of the morning a thirty-year stretch in Wormwood Scrubs would come as a blessed relief.

"Committee of enquiry will come to order."

I've been here before, and I didn't like it the first time. The panel has requisitioned a small conference room, furnished in nineties government brutalist-lite: Aeron chairs and bleached pine table, health and safety posters on one wall, security notices on the other. The tribunal sits at the far end of the table, like a pin-striped hanging judge and his assistants. And they've rolled out that fucking carpet again, the one with the gold thread design woven into it, and the Enochian inscription, and the live summoning grid powerful enough to twist tendons and snap bones.

There is no peanut gallery at this trial. Jo is waiting outside with a couple of blue-suiters and the other designated witnesses, but the Auditors want no inconvenient onlookers who might have to be bound to silence or memory-wiped, should I accidentally disclose material above their level of classification.

"Please state your name and job title." There's a recorder on the desk, as usual: its light is glowing red.

"Bob Howard. Senior Specialist Officer grade 3. Personal assistant to Tea--er, DSS Angleton."

That causes a minor stir. One of the Auditors--female, blonde, lateforties--turns sideways and says something to the others that I ought to be able to hear, but can't. The other two nod. She turns back and addresses me directly. "Mr. Howard. You are aware of the terms of this investigation. You are aware of the geas it is conducted under. You have our special dispensation to respond to any question, the first time it is posed--and only the first time--by warning us if in your judgment the reply would require you to disclose codeword-classified information. Please state your understanding of this variance, in your own words."

I clear my throat. "If you ask me about sensitive projects I'm allowed to stonewall--once. If you ask me again, I have to tell you, period. Uh, I assume that's because you'd prefer to keep the enquiry from accidentally covering so many highly classified subjects that nobody is allowed to read its findings . . . ?"

She smiles drily. "Something like that." It feels like the Angel of Death has just perched on my shoulder, paused from sharpening its blade, and quietly squawked: Who's a pretty Polly? Then the sense of immanent ridiculous demise passes. Ha ha, I slay myself . . .

The Chief Auditor nods, then looks at the legal pad before him. "Yesterday you visited the library front desk. What was your objective?"

Lie back and think of England--and nothing else. "Angleton gave me a reading list," I said. "He told me to bring back a particular document." Pause. "Oh, and Mo wanted me to pick up a copy of a report she'd asked for, but it wasn't in yet."

There is no prickling of high tension current in my legs to warn me that my partial truth is unacceptable.

"Who is 'Mo'?" asks Auditor #3.

"Dr. Dominique O'Brien. Epistemological Warfare Specialist grade 4."

Auditor #3 leans forward hungrily. "Why did this person ask you to collect a document on their behalf?" he demands.

I blink, nonplussed. "Because I told her I was going to the library, and she was busy. She's my wife."

Auditor #3 looks baffled for a few seconds, his bloodhound trail evaporating in a haze of aniseed fumes. "You're married?"

"Yes." This would be hilarious if I wasn't scared silly by the sleeping horror I am standing on that will sense any attempt at deception and--

"Oh." He makes a note on his pad and subsides.

The blonde Auditor gives him a very old-fashioned look, then turns to me: "Are you cleared for the content of her work?" she asks.

Huh? "I have no idea," I say sincerely. "We only discuss projects we're working on after comparing codeword access and if necessary asking for clearance." Then the glyph on the goddamn rug forces me to add, "But this time it doesn't matter, the document hadn't arrived anyway."

She scribbles something on her own notepad. "Did Dr. O'Brien tell you anything about this particular note?" she asks.

I blink. "I have no idea. She simply gave me the file reference number--no codeword."

More notes, more significant looks. The senior Auditor stares at me over the gold half-moon rims of his spectacles. "Mr. Howard. Please indicate if you are familiar with any of these individuals. Matthias Hoechst, Jessica Morgenstern, George Dower, Nikolai Panin--" He nods at my hand signal. "Describe what you know about Nikolai Panin."

"I had a pint with him in the Frog and Tourettes the day before yesterday."

The effect is astonishing: the Auditors jerk to attention like a row of frogs with cattle prods up their backsides. I meet their appalled gaze with a sense of sublime lightness. They want the truth? Okay, they can fucking have the truth.

"I reported it as a contact to the BLOODY BARON committee at the first opportunity, and it was agreed to keep it quiet for the time being. Panin seems to have wanted to pass on a warning about Teapot. He was concerned that it was missing, and that as its last custodians we ought to ensure it was found before the wrong persons got their hands on it and, uh, 'made tea.'" I smile blandly. "Angleton authorized me to read the WHITE BARON files and I have inferred the identity of Teapot."

The Chief Auditor shakes his head. "Bloody hell," he grumbles, then, to me: "Do you know where Angleton is?"

I open my mouth--then pause. Now I can feel the electric flare of the geas tickling the fine hairs on my legs.

The blonde Auditor narrows her eyes. "Speak," she commands.

I can't not speak, but I still have some control. "I don't believe Angleton has assigned it a codeword yet," I hear myself saying, "but his disappearance is connected with an ongoing investigation and I don't think he wants me to tell anyone about it . . ."

My legs feel as if they're immersed in cold fire up to the knees. I gasp for breath, just as the Chief Auditor hastily holds up his hand: "Stay of execution! The subject has invoked the security variance." He peers at me. "Can you confirm that you are cognizant of Angleton's whereabouts?"

I nod, jerkily. The chilly, searing fingers recede down my calves.

"In your judgment, is Angleton working in the best interests of this institution?"

I nod like a parcel shelf ornament.

"Also in your judgment, would it impair his work on behalf of this institution if we continue to explore this line of enquiry?"

I think for a moment. Then I nod, emphatically.

"Very well." Light glints on his spectacles as he looks at me for a few seconds. "On your recommendation, we will not enquire further--unless you have something you would like to tell us?"

Careful, Bob! This is an Audit board you're up against. They're at their most dangerous when they're being reasonable, and they can turn all the fires of hell--imaginary or otherwise--on you if you don't cooperate.

I take a deep breath. "I'm confused," I finally say. "I thought this was an enquiry about the break-in and theft from my office safe, but you've been asking questions about Angleton and Mo instead. What's going on?"

Wrong question: Auditor #3 smiles sharkishly and the blonde Auditor shakes her head. "It is not in the remit of this committee to answer questions," says the Chief Auditor, a trifle archly. "Now, back to the matter in hand. I have some questions about office supplies. When did you last order stationery fasteners from office stores, and how many and what type did you request . . . ?"

WHILE I'M BEING HAULED OVER THE COALS, MO RISES AT HER usual hour, makes coffee, eats a cereal bar, reads my text message. It's along the lines of HELD UP AT WORK IN COMMITTEE. She frowns, worried but not unduly alarmed. (My texts range from verbose and eloquent--when I'm bored--to monosyllabic, when the entire cesspit is about to be ingested by a jet engine. This intermediate level is indicative of stress, but not of mortal danger.)

She leaves the dregs of the coffee in the pot, and the cereal bar wrapper on top of the other waste in the kitchen bin. She goes upstairs, dresses, collects violin and coat, and leaves.

Sometimes Mo works in the New Annexe; and sometimes she doesn't. There's an office in the Royal College of Music where her name is one of three listed on the door. There's a course in philosophy of mathematics at King's College where she sometimes lectures--and forwards reports on her pupils to Human Resources. And she's a regular visitor at the Village, across the fens and up the coast by boat, where the Laundry keeps certain assets that don't belong in a crowded city. Today, she sets out by tube, heading for the city center. She is on her way to ask Mr. Dower whether he did in fact mail his report. And she is in for a surprise.

Watch the red-haired woman in a black suit, violin case in hand, walking up the pavement towards the shuttered shopfront with the blue-and-white police incident tape stretched across the doorway. Traffic cones with more tape stand to either side of the shop front, fluttering in the light breeze. She pauses, nonplussed, then looks around. There is a police officer standing discreetly by, hands clasped behind his back. She glances back at the taped-off doorway. There is no dark stain on the lintel--the SOC officers and the cleanup crew did their job well--but the ward she wears under her blouse buzzes a warning. Her expression hardens, and she walks towards the constable, reaching into her handbag to produce an identity card.

"What happened here, officer?" she asks quietly, holding the card where he can't help but see it.

He doesn't stand a chance. "Who, uh, oh dear . . ." He shakes his head. "Ma'am. Murder scene. You can't go, I mean, you shouldn't . . ."

"Who's in charge here?" she enquires. "Where can I find them?"

"That'd be DI Wolfe, from MIT 4. He's set up shop round the back--that way, that alley there--who should I say--"

"In the name of national security, I command and require you to forget me," she says, slipping the card away and turning towards the alley that runs around to the back of the row of four shops. The constable's eyes close momentarily; by the time he opens them again, the woman with the violin case is gone.

Ten minutes later, the back door to George Dower's shop clicks open. Two figures step inside: a uniformed detective sergeant and the woman. Both of them wear disposable polythene slippers over their shoes; she still holds her violin case. "Don't touch anything--tell me what you want to look at," he says, pulling on a pair of disposable gloves. "What exactly are you after?"

"First of all, what state is his PC in?"

"It wasn't stolen, so we bagged it." The sergeant sounds sure of himself. "If you're wanting to scrape the hard drive, we can have an image of it available in an hour or so."

Mo cools slightly. If the killer left the PC behind, then there's almost certainly nothing left on it but random garbage, an entropic mess that not even CESG will be able to unerase. "Any memory sticks? Small stuff? CD-Rs?"

"We bagged them, too." The sergeant picks his way into Dower's workshop, which still reeks of rosin and varnish. A row of disemboweled instruments hang from a rail overhead, like corpses in the dissectionist's cold parlor. Those tools that are not in their places on the pegboard that covers one wall are laid out on the bench in parallel rows, neatly sorted by size. The metal parts gleam like surgical steel, polished and unnaturally bright.

"Any papers?"

The sergeant pauses beside a rolltop desk, itself an antique, Victorian or Edwardian. "Yes," he says reluctantly. "They're scheduled for pickup tomorrow so we can continue working on the contact list. Receipts, suppliers' brochures, estimates, that sort of thing."

"I'm looking for an appraisal of a customer's instrument," she tells him. "It will be dated yesterday or the day before, and it relates to a violin. It may be in an unmarked envelope, like this one." She produces an envelope from her bag.

"Like that--" The officer's eyes widen and his back straightens. "Would you happen to have any information about the killer?" he asks. "Because if so--"

Mo shakes her head. "I do not know who the killer is." The sergeant stares at her, seeking eye contact. "The victim was commissioned to prepare a report for my department. He was due to post it on the evening when the incident occurred. It has not been delivered."

"What was he meant to report on?"

Mo makes eye contact at last, and the detective sergeant recoils slightly from whatever he sees in her expression. "You have no need to know. If it appears that there is a connection between the report and the killing, my department will notify Inspector Wolfe immediately. Similarly, if the identity of the killer comes to our attention." She doesn't add, in such a way that we can disclose it without violating security protocol: that much is always understood to be a minor chord in the uneasy duet of spook and cop. "The report, however, is a classified document and should be treated as such." And she raises her warrant card again.

The detective sergeant is clearly torn between the urgent desire to get her into an interview room and the equally urgent desire to get her the hell out of this shop, and away from what was until a few minutes ago a straightforward--if rather unusual--murder investigation; but being on the receiving end of a Laundry warrant card is an oh-shit moment. It begins with the phrase Her Britannic Majesty's government commands and compels you to provide the bearer of this pass with all aid and assistance , written atop a design of such subtle and mind-numbing power that it makes the reader's breath catch in his throat as suddenly as if trapped by a hangman's noose. He can no more ignore it--and no more ignore her instructions--than he can ignore a gun pointed at his head.

"What do you want?" he finally asks.

"I want the contents of that report." She lowers her card. "I suspect the killer doesn't want me to have it. So if you find it, call me." She produces a business card and he takes it. Then her roving gaze settles on the desk. "Oh, and one other thing. Are there any paper clips or staples in there? Because if so, I want them all."

"Paper clips?"

"Yes, I want all the paper clips and staples in that desk." Her cheek quirks. "Mr. Dower was the type to fasten a report together before folding it and putting it in an envelope. And where there's a link, there's a chain of evidence."

THE AUDIT BOARD CHEWS ME UP AND SPITS ME OUT IN LESS than an hour. Light as thistledown and dry as a dead man's tongue I walk through the door, past the seated witnesses--the blue-suiters are collecting Choudhury now, ushering him into the Presence--and drift on stumbling feet towards my office. Except I don't get very far: instead I bump up against a blue translucent bubble that seems to have swallowed the corridor, and everything in it, just before Iris's office door. The bubble is warm and rubbery and I have a feeling that it would be a very bad idea indeed to try and bull my way through it, so I turn round and go back the other way, towards the coffee station.

I'm just scooping brown powder into a filter cone (the jug was empty right when I most needed it, as usual) when Iris clears her throat behind me.

"I've been Audited," I say, in answer to her silent question. "I don't think it went badly, but I gather I'm not allowed back in my office just yet."

"No one is," she says, surprisingly calmly. "Are you making a fresh pot?"

"Sure." I slide the basket back into the coffee maker and hit the brew button. Iris watches me silently.

"Um, as a matter of fact, you won't be going back to work for a bit," she says.

"I--what?" The coffee machine clears its throat behind me as I stare at her.

"The civilian FATACC incident when you were out at Cosford has been upgraded." Her expression is apologetic. "Sorry doesn't begin to cut it, I know, but the Incident Committee has escalated it to Internal Affairs and they actioned me to notify you that you're being suspended on full pay pending a full hearing."

"They're what?" I hear my voice rise uncontrollably, cracked. But what about Angleton's plan? "But it's not a FATACC anymore--"

"Bob! Bob? Calm down. This isn't the end of the world. I'm sure the hearing will exonerate you; they don't want you in the office until it's over. It's just a routine precaution--Bob?"

She's talking to my back--I'm halfway down the corridor by the time she says my name, then round the bend and halfway down the twist that takes me to the stairwell to Angleton's office. Because (fuck Helen Langhorn and her KGB sleeper medals, part of me is swearing furiously) I know damn well that I'm going to be exonerated, because the victim wasn't a victim: she was a hostile agent who poked her nose into an off-limits area at the wrong time. So the question is: Why now? And there's only one species of answer that fits--

I take the stairs two at a time, thudding down them hard enough to raise dust from the elderly carpet, bouncing off the bannister rail and caroming up against the door. I raise my phone and squint through its magic-mirror eye, seeing that the wards are merely the usual ones, and then I twist the doorknob and push.

"Boss?" I glance around the empty room. The Memex sits in its corner, hulking like a sleeping baby elephant; the filing cabinets are all neatly shut and sealed. "Boss?"

He's not here. My spine crawls. Need to leave him a message. I head for the Memex and slide into the operator's seat.

WRITE CLEARANCE.

I foot-type TEAPOT and wait for the soul-mangling symbol to disappear.

WRITE.

The menu prompt is empty. MESSAGE, I type. The prompt changes, and I keep going.

BOSS, THEY TOOK THE BAIT. PROBLEM: IA ARE SUSPENDING ME OVER COSFORD. AUDITORS MORE INTERESTED IN PAPER CLIPS. MY MOBILE NUMBER IS: . . .

Angleton isn't a total technophobe. As long as he has my phone number he can get in touch. But now I've got another problem: I'm not supposed to be here. So I switch off the Memex carefully and stand up, and I'm just on the point of tiptoeing out of the room when two blue-suiters appear out of nowhere and grab my wrists.

"Careful now, sir. We wouldn't want to make a fuss, would we?"

I look past his shoulder at Iris. She looks concerned. "Bob, what are you doing? Didn't I tell you you were being suspended?"

I pant for breath. My heart's hammering and my palms are slippery. "I was hoping--Angleton--"

She shakes her head sympathetically, then tuts to herself. "I think you're overwrought. He's been having a bad time lately," she explains to the blue-suiters. "You need to go home and relax badly, don't you, Bob?"

I can take a hint. I nod.

Blue-suit #2 clears his throat apologetically. "If he's not cleared for this room, ma'am--" he begins.

"No, that's all right," Iris says, casting me a quelling look. "He's--he was--personal secretary to DSS Angleton. He's cleared for this room, and he's not required to be off the premises until noon, and he obviously hasn't touched anything"--I blink at that, but keep my mouth shut--"so you may feel free to report it, but he hasn't actually violated the security articles. Yet." She taps her wristwatch. "Not for another nine minutes. So I suggest you might want to take a deep breath and let these gentlemen escort you to the front door, Bob?"

She's right. I really don't want to still be in the building when my permission is suspended--the consequences would be drastic and painful, I imagine. "I'll go quietly," I hear myself saying. "If you'd like to lead the way . . ."

AT TWELVE THIRTY EXACTLY I FIND MYSELF STANDING ALONE in the middle of a concrete emptiness, the blurred ghosts of shoppers darting around me like shadows beneath a pitiless sun. I can't remember how I came to this place. My hands are shaking and I can't see the future. All I can see is gray. The sun is beating down but I'm cold inside. I keep seeing a purple flash, the old woman's face rotting and flaking and shrinking around her skull before me; the thing on the bike path, growling deep in its throat.

(They took my pistol. "Don't want you to go carrying that around when you're all depressed, sir," the blue-suiter told me.) I'd phone Mo and ask her to pick up another ward if I wasn't feeling so frustrated and ineffectual.

Everything's fallen apart at the very worst time, and it's all my fault.

Item: There is a security breach. The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom--hereafter and forevermore to be known as the Goatfuckers, because that's the least of what they get up to and I don't want to think about them eating the blonde teacher's face--have got an informer inside the Laundry.

I walk past a bus stop and an overflowing litter bin, the ashtray on its lid smoking and fulminating. There's a disgusting stench of cheap tobacco and smoldering filter wadding. A convoy of buses rumbles past slowly, like a troupe of implausibly red elephants walking trunk-to-tail.

Item: They followed Mo home and they're following me, and unless I'm very much mistaken they want the key that binds the Eater of Souls, which is probably one of our most powerful weapons. (Disguised as a public school master indeed!)

There's a rundown concrete suburban shopping mall here, a brutalist plaza surrounded by walkways overlooking cheap supermarkets, an off-license, and a shuttered chemist's. Abandoned disposable carrier bags clog the gutters. I walk beneath a bridge between two piers, and up an arcade walled by the display windows of empty shop units, as grimy as my sense of self-worth.

Item: The Goatfuckers aren't the only people who are into the Laundry; Panin and the Thirteenth Directorate clearly know a lot more than I do about the CODICIL BLACK SKULL flights, Triple-six Squadron, and the Eater of Souls (who keeps cropping up in this mess like a bad penny). And anything that worries the KGB ought to worry the hell out of me, too.

I come out of the arcade in a wide alley lined with loading bays, rusting metal shutters drawn down across concrete slabs. Overflowing dumpsters redolent with the sweet fetor of dead rats lean between scraped and battered steel bollards, huddling together like school kids sharing a fag behind the bike shed. The sky is clouding over, the merciless sun shrouded by dirty clouds of doubtful provenance. I keep walking.

Item: The Auditors wanted to know about Mo, and about paper clips. I know about paper clips and why they're a security risk. (The laws of contagion and sympathy are fundamental to all systems of magic: quantum entanglement and spooky action-at-a-distance for the witch doctor set. More prosaically, if you've got a paper clip from the same box as a sibling that's clipped to a top secret file . . . you figure it out. Okay?) But why did they want to know about Mo? What was the document she wanted me to retrieve? Am I missing something? What if it's not all about me, or Angleton? The business in Saint Martin a few years ago should have been a wake-up call. Just because I'm under investigation, it doesn't mean she--

--The hell I'm under investigation. No. I'm under suspicion. But suspicion of what?

My feet carry me past the end of the delivery alley and across a road where a cast-iron railway bridge shadows the terraced houses, their fronts smeared with smuts from the diesel locomotives that rumble overhead, freighting coal to the power stations that keep the lights burning and the hard drives turning. There is a cycle path here, and my feet seem to know which way they're going. I turn left and find myself on an incline, ascending a tree-flanked slope. The faint tinkle of a bell prompts me to stand aside as an urban cyclist in luminous lycra zips past, coasting in the opposite direction.

Item: Angleton wants to use me as a tethered goat, but I'm not much use to him if I'm not in the right place when the Goatfuckers come calling. Damn, I hope he gets my message via the Memex. Where are we leaking? Is it via the BLOODY BARON committee? That seems to be the logical place, but . . .

A chill creeps over me and I glance up at a turbid cloudscape that wasn't there five minutes ago, swirling masses of dirty cumulonimbus crammed with a promise of rain to come. Uh-oh. Here's me, out and about in a lightweight summer jacket. I really ought to head for home. I keep walking, because it seems like the thing to do, although the shadows are lengthening among the dark green trees to either side. The cycle path is empty; I ought to start looking for an exit from it that'll take me back down to street level and a bus stop or tube station. I glance behind me, but I can't see the ramp I came up anymore.

Item: Doctor Mike's research finding about the early onset of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Let's hypothesize that the Goatfuckers heard about it by way of our security breach. We know the Goatfuckers want CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to come about--they're fans of the old, dead nightmares that will stalk the planet once more. (They worship the things. How twisted is that?) Ford's new finding suggests that the onset conditions for tearing a hole in the structure of reality are a bit more flexible than we previously thought. Which suggests that there are things the Goatfuckers can do to accelerate the onset of apocalypse, the stars coming right as the pulp writer put it. They're showing an interest in the Eater of Souls. Why? Do they think that if they get their hands on the Fuller Memorandum they can control him, make him do something unspeakable that will shiver the stars in their tracks and split the sky apart like--

--I look up. "Oh fuck." Then I shut my mouth and save my breath for more important activities. Like, for example, running away.

While I have been wandering aimlessly, locked in my head, my feet have guided me onto a dismal path. There are no cyclists or pedestrians in sight, just an endless dark strip of tarmac that curves out of sight ahead and behind me, surrounded by impenetrable walls of spiny evergreen shrubs that lean inwards above my head. I can't see through the hedge, but there are pallid mushroom-like structures bursting from the soil around their roots. The cloudscape overhead is turbulent and dappled, side-lit by sunlight slanting under its floor--even though there are hours yet to go until sunset--and the ever-shifting whirlpools and knots of darkness roll and dance, lit from within by the snapshots of cosmic paparazzi.

I have no idea how I got here and I'm not amused with myself for succumbing to what was, at a guess, a very low-key glamour, but the urge to get out and find a safe refuge is overwhelming. Every instinct is screaming that I'm in immediate danger. And so I begin to jog, just as the U-boat klaxon starts to honk urgently from my breast pocket.

"Bob?" It's Mo.

"I'm kind of busy right now," I pant. "What's up?"

"The memo I was after, are you sure it wasn't in?"

Huh? "I'm dead sure. Listen, what was it about?"

"That external appraisal of my violin, I told you about that, remember?"

"Oh, that--"

"The examiner was murdered! About thirty-six hours ago. Bob, if they think you've got the violin report--"

"Listen, let me give you an update. I've been suspended on pay. I need you to pick up a ward for me, as soon as you can. I'm heading home now, but I'm in a spot of bother and they took my pistol. Angleton isn't AWOL: Can you find him and tell him he was right, the Goatfuckers are after the bait and I need backup right now--"

The NecronomiPod beeps at me three times and drops the call.

"Fuck." I thumb-tap the software ward back to life, then shove the JesusPhone back in my pocket and keep jogging, breathing heavily now. There's a breeze in my face, shoving me back and slowing me down, and the surface of the footpath feels greasy and turgid, almost sticky. The sense of wrongness is overwhelming. I have a sense of deja vu, harking back to my midnight run, although that path was miles away and didn't look anything like . . .

Oh. Am I on a siding? I ask myself, as the headwind builds and the shadows deepen. I hear distant thunder and the first heavy slap of rain-drops on the path ahead: Did the Necropolitan line have branches that were edited out of the public record decades ago, by any chance?

The hoarse scream of a ghostly steam whistle echoes in my ears. It's behind me. And it's gaining ground.

It's funny how you lose track of a situation while it spins out of control: in the space of about fifteen minutes I've let myself be led by the nose--or rather, the feet--from a busy suburban high street in London, right into an occult trap. There are places where the walls of reality are thin; the service corridors of hotels, subway footpaths at night, hedge-mazes and cycle paths. You can get lost in such places, led astray by a lure and a snare and a subliminal suggestion. These routes blend into one another. Of all the myriad ways that link the human realm to the other places, these are the ones we know very little about--because those of us who stumble into them seldom return with their minds intact.

I can feel my heart hammering as I run. The hedges to either side brandish spikes edged with a nacreous rind of blight. There are pale white shapes embedded in the wall of leaves, the flensed bones of intruders trapped in the interstices of the vegetative barrier. Overhead, the clouds are black as smoke from the funnel of a racing steam locomotive, boiling and raging at the ground. I don't dare look back, even though I'm sure I'm being herded towards an ambush: the phone in my pocket is buzzing and vibrating in urgent Morse, signaling the presence of hostile intent.

I need to get off the path. The trouble is, there's nowhere to go--

Hang on, I think. Am I seeing true?

There is this about the interstitial paths: it takes a fair bit of power to open a gate, and I didn't notice any pentacles and altars draped in eviscerated goats during my walk through the decaying shopping center. On the other hand, it takes relatively little power to fake up a glamour to provide the illusion of a dark path. Wheezing, I reach for my phone, thumb it on, and slow my stride just enough that I can see the display. Bloody Runes, ward detector, turn the camera on the footpath--

A silver thread, disappearing around the bend ahead of me. I pan sideways, and the camera blurs then clears, showing me ordinary English nettles and a thinly spaced row of trees pruned well back from the path. It's bright, too, the ground dappled with summer daylight filtered through the branches overhead. Gotcha. I jink sideways, towards the menacing hedgerow on my right, slowing, eyes focused on the face of my phone as the shadows of the thorny wall loom over me--

And I crash through a stand of waist-high nettles and narrowly miss a young beech tree as the hedge and the thunderstorm sky vanish like the illusion they are.

"Ow!" I swear under my breath, the hot-bright pinprick sting of nettles rising on the back of my phone hand. I examine the side of the cutting the path runs through. Yes, it's familiar. I've been here before, or somewhere very like it. Except for the lack of pedestrians walking the dog, or cyclists en route from one side of town to the other, it could be a normal bike track. But this one's been warded off; anyone starting down it who isn't wanted is going to feel a mild sense of dread, rising after a while to an urgent conviction that they need to be anywhere else.

I thumb my phone back to the start screen, and look for a signal. There's nothing showing. That shouldn't be possible, not on a major network in the middle of a city, but there are zero bars. Do the bad guys have a jammer? It wouldn't be unheard of. And they knew enough to lay a snare right outside the New Annexe, one tailored for me . . . that is not good news. I sit down behind a tree, careful to check that I'm concealed from the path by that stand of stinging nettles, and then I do something that's overdue: I compose an email to the two people I know I can trust--Angleton and Mo. The JesusPhone is smart enough to keep looking for a connection, and to send the mail as soon as it snags a signal. Then I compose a slightly different email to a whole bunch of people I don't entirely trust, remembering to include Angleton and Mo on the recipient list, and send it. Now that should set the cat among the pigeons. My heartbeat is just about back to normal by the time I finish, and my lungs aren't burning anymore, so I slide my phone into an inside jacket pocket and stand up.

Click-clack. "Don't move."

12.

COUNTERMEASURES

MEANWHILE, OVER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LOOKING GLASS:

"Listen, let me give you an update. I've been suspended on pay. I need you to pick up a ward for me, as soon as you can. I'm heading home now, but I'm inaudible and they inaudible can you find him and tell him inaudible--"

Mo sighs, exasperated, as her phone beeps three times and hangs up on Bob. She waits five seconds, then hits redial. It connects immediately.

"Hello, you have reached the voice mail of--"

She puts her phone away, leaving it for later. Bob's obviously in a poor reception zone, but if he's heading home they can compare notes in a couple of hours. Being suspended is bad news for Bob, but she's been half-expecting it. They've both been under too much pressure lately: the business with the cultists, the suspected leak, all the other minutiae of being part of the operational front end of an organization under increasing strain. Everyone is under strain these days; even the people who aren't cleared to know about Dr. Mike's bombshell.

Mo heads towards an anonymous industrial estate in the suburbs out near Croydon, where some of the more technical departments have relocated while Service House is being rebuilt. She travels by tube and then commuter train, and finally by bus, keeping one hand on her violin case at all times. It takes her an hour and a half to make the journey: strap-hanging in grim silence, alone with her worries about the evidence she removed from Mr. Dower's workshop. She travels under the gaze of cameras; cameras on the tube platforms, cameras in the railway station concourses, cameras on the buses. Many of them are linked to the SCORPION STARE network, part of the huge surveillance web the government is spinning to keep the nation safe in the final days. But the final days may be about to arrive with a bang, two or three years earlier than anticipated . . .

She walks the hundred meters to the car park entrance, then enters an anonymous-looking office reception area in an otherwise windowless building. A plain signboard on the high razor-wire-topped fence outside proclaims it the property of Invicta Security Ltd., and the portrait of a slavering German shepherd beneath the sign promises a warm welcome to would-be burglars. Both signs are, of course, lying: the building currently houses most of the Occult Forensics Department, and there's no easy way to visually depict the protean, gelatinous horrors that ooze around the premises by night.

"Hello, Invicta--" The blue-suiter behind the counter pauses. "Dr. O'Brien. Can I see your pass, please?"

Mo presents her warrant card. "Hi, Dave. Is Dr. Williams in?"

"I think so." Dave pokes at his computer terminal. "Yes, he's booked in. Do you need to see him?"

"I've got a job on. Can you page him?"

"I'll do that." Dave points a webcam on a stalk at her, then prints off a temporary badge. "Here, wear this. It's valid for zones one and two, you know the drill."

"Yes." Mo doesn't smile. Whereas the New Annexe mostly deals with paper (apart from the armory), the OFD handles physically--and in some cases spiritually--hazardous materials. Access to the inner zones is restricted for good reason.

While Dave pages Dr. Williams, Mo plants herself on one of the powder-blue waiting area seat-things, and idly pages through some of the magazines on the occasional table: Forensic Sciences Digest, Gunshot Wounds Monthly, Which? PCR. Her attention is a million kilometers away from the articles, but they serve as a distraction for her eyes. She has one of the magazines open at a color spread of spent bullets retrieved from victims of crime when a shadow falls across her. "Mo! What brings you out here?"

She looks up, forcing a smile. "Nick? Are you busy? Can we discuss this in your office?"

Five minutes later, another windowless office with overflowing bookshelves and too many filing cabinets. "What have you got for me?" he asks. Balding, in his late forties, Nick is the research lead in this particular lab.

"A special job." Mo pauses. "Sub rosa."

"Sub--Oh shit. Tell me it isn't so."

She shakes her head. "I think it's probably a leak rather than an inside job, but even so, this is for you, not the office junior. Eyes only." She pulls out the tub of paper clips from Mr. Dower's workroom, and the small stapler from beside his cash register, and places them on the worktable opposite Dr. Williams's desk. "The owner of these items was murdered about forty-eight hours ago. He'd just prepared a special report for me. I'm pretty certain the killer took the report, and knowing George--the victim--he would have paper-clipped or stapled it. So I want a full read on the top copy--and a locator."

Dr. Williams whistles between his front teeth. "You don't want much, do you?" He pauses. "When do you need it by?"

"Right now." Mo positions her violin case on the visitor's chair, then lets go of it. "It's very urgent."

"Oh. I can have it with you by eight tonight, if I--"

"No." She smiles, letting him see her teeth. "When I said now, I meant right now."

"What's so urgent?" Williams, unwilling to be rushed, crosses his arms and stares at her.

"Are you on the distribution for CLUB ZERO?"

Williams's face turns ashen. "That was the business in Amsterdam, wasn't it?"

"They're over here, too. The document in question is a detailed report on that." She points at the violin case. "Whoever has got the report is almost certainly a live hostile, and may I remind you that the item they're after is in your office?" Her smile evaporates. "You really want to get me out of here . . ."

THERE IS A PHILOSOPHY BY WHICH MANY PEOPLE LIVE THEIR lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.

These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grew up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's-a-Rolex brigade.

(This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives, are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities for people of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)

There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: you will do as I say or I will hurt you.

It's petty authoritarianism, and it frequently runs in families. Dad's a dictator, Mum's henpecked, and the kids keep quiet if they know what's good for them--all the while soaking up the lesson that mindless obedience is the only safe course of action. These kids often rescue themselves, but some of them don't. They grow up to be thugs, insecure and terrified of uncertainty, intolerant and unable to handle back-chat, willing to use violence to get what they want.

Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade in the intersecting area in a different color, and label it: dangerous . Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its own, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity--but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.

There is a third philosophy by which--thankfully--only a tiny minority of people live their lives. It's a bit harder to sum up, but it begins like this: in the beginning was the endless void, and the void spawned the Elder things, and we were created to be their slaves, and they're going to return to Earth in the near future, and it is only by willingly subordinating ourselves to their merest whim that we can hope to survive--

Now let me drop another circle on the diagram, and scribble in the tiny patch where it intersects with the other two circles, and label it in deepest fuliginous black: here be monsters.

Greedy: check. Authoritarian: check. Worshipers of the most bizarre, anti-human monsters you can imagine: check. That's the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh (and their masks like the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom) and all of their ilk. Hateful, dangerous, unpleasant, greedy, and all-around bad people who you don't want to have anything to do with if you can help it.

There's just one problem with this picture . . .

That bit about in the beginning was the endless void?

They're right.

(Oops.)

Here's the problem:

We live in a hideously reticulated multiverse, where most of the dimensionality of spacetime is hidden from our view--curved in on themselves in closed loops, tucked away in imaginary spaces--but the stuff we can observe is a tiny fraction of the entirety of what we live in. Magic, the stuff I deal with in the office on a day-to-day basis, involves the indirect manipulation of information flow through these unseen dimensions, and communication with the extra-dimensional entities that live elsewhere. I'm an applied computational demonologist--how can I not believe this stuff?

Not the bit about original creation, oh no. Beings like N'yar lath-Hotep didn't mold us out of the black clay of the Nile delta: I've got no beef with modern cosmology. But those of them who take an interest in our kind find it useful for humans to believe such myths, and so they encourage the cultist numpties through their pursuit of forbidden lore.

We aren't alone in this cosmos; we aren't even alone on this planet, as anyone who's met a BLUE HADES can attest (there's a reason all those domed undersea cities of the future never got built in the 1950s) . . . and don't get me started on DEEP SEVEN, the lurkers in the red-hot depths. But our neighbors, the Deep Ones and the Chthonians, are adapted for wildly different biospheres. There is no colonial overlap to bring us to the point of conflict--which is a very good thing, because the result would be a very rapid Game Over: Humans Lose.

The things that keep me awake in the small hours aren't anything like as approachable as a Deep One. (Hell, I've worked with a Deep One. Left a part of my soul behind with her. No matter.) The things that terrify me are blue-green worms, twisting and coiling luminous intrusions glimpsed in the abruptly emptied eyes of a former colleague; minds patient and incomprehensibly old that find amusement in our tortured writhing; Boltzmann Brains from the chaotic, necrotic depths of the distant future, reaching back through the thinning ultrastructure of spacetime to idly toy with our reality. Things that go "bump" in the night eternal. Things that eat us--

There is a fourth and final philosophy by which some of us live our lives, and it boils down to this: do not go quietly into that dark night. Draw a fourth circle on that now-crowded Venn diagram and you'll see that while it intersects the greedy and authoritarian circles, and even has a tiny overlap with the greedy authoritarian bit, it doesn't quite intersect with the third circle, the worshipers. It holds up a mirror to their self-destruction. Call it the circle of the necromantic apostates. That's where I stand, whether I'm greedy or authoritarian or both. (I don't think I'm either, but how can I be sure?)

I may believe in mind-eating horrors from beyond spacetime, but they'll have to break my neck before I bend it to their yoke.

Keep telling yourself that, Bob.

MO CARRIES HER VIOLIN AND FOLLOWS DR. WILLIAMS AS HE picks up a chipped plywood tea tray and backs through a swinging door, carrying the jar of paper clips and the stapler. The glass window in the door is hazed by a fine wire mesh, and the edges of the door are lined with copper fingers that close against a metal strip inside the frame. Williams places the tray on one end of an optical workbench, then bolts the door and flips a switch connected to a red lamp outside his office.

"You've worked with one of these before?" he asks.

"Of course." Mo shrugs out of her jacket and hangs it on a hook. "It's the entanglement-retrieval bit I'm unfamiliar with. That, and I may need a lab report. I know my limits."

"Good." Williams's smile is humorless. "Then if I tell you to stay in the isolation grid over there you know what the consequences are for getting things wrong."

"Indeed." She opens the violin case and removes her bone-white instrument and its bow. Williams stares at it for a moment.

"Do you really need that?"

"When I said they're targeting me, I wasn't exaggerating. Besides, the document they stole was a report on this very instrument. If they're trying to backtrack from it to find the original, then when you bring up the Adams-Todt resonance it might lead them here."

Dr. Williams snorts. "I'm sure the front desk will be very happy to see them." He turns to the bench and unclamps a swinging arm, uses it to position a glass diffraction grating in a path defined by a set of curious pentagonal prisms positioned at the ten vertices of an irregular pentacle. "Would you pass me the data logger? It's the second one along on the top shelf . . ."

It takes Dr. Williams a quarter of an hour to set up the forensic magician's workbench. Apart from the odd geometric layout it doesn't resemble the popular imagination's picture of a sorcerer's laboratory. Colored chalk lines and eye of newt are gone, replaced by solid-state lasers and signal generators: pointy hats and robes have given way to polarized goggles and lab coats. The samples, stripped of their containers, are transferred to windowed containers using perspex tongs. Williams slots them into place in the observation rig. "Okay, stations," he says conversationally. "I haven't modified the beam line so there should be no overspill, but I'll run a low power test first just in case."

Mo and the forensic demonologist move to stand inside complex designs inlaid in the floor in pure copper. "How's your personal ward?" he asks.

Mo reaches for the fine silver chain around her neck. "Mine's fine," she says slowly. "Damn, I should have drawn a spare for Bob. It's a bit late now, do you have any kicking around?"

"I'll see what I can do afterwards. Okay, goggles on, lights going out. Testing in ten, nine, eight . . ." He pushes a switch. The red laser beam is only visible where it passes through the prisms. "You getting any overspill?"

"None." The room is dark, the only light source the faint trickle through the thickly frosted glass of the window in the door.

"Good." Williams cuts the power, then reaches across the bench by touch and rotates the sample tubes a quarter turn, lining them up with the beam path. Then he adjusts a mirror, flipping it to face a different and bulkier laser. "Okay, I'm switching to the high power source. Going live in ten, nine, eight . . . ."

An image shimmers faintly in the darkness, stitched out in violet speckles across the translucent face of the screen on the optical bench. A pallid rectangle, violet with black runes.

"That might be it," Mo says quietly.

"I expect so. I'm upping the power." The rectangle fills in, glowing brighter and brighter. "Okay, I'm exposing the photographic paper now."

"What kind of camera . . . ?"

"Pinhole, with two holes. Yes, it's a double-split interferometer. Quiet, now . . ." There's a soft click. Ten seconds later there's another click. "Okay, I got the exposure done. Shame we can't use CCDs for this job, but you wouldn't want to feed some of the things we look at to a computing device . . . Right. You want to look at the bearer?"

"Yes." Mo leans forward, careful to stay within her ward (which glows pale blue, the nacreous glimmer washing over her feet). "It might retrieve Mr. Dower; I can identify him. If it's anyone else, I'd like a portrait, please."

"I'll just reload the interferometer. Wait one . . . Okay, I'm ready. Now comes the fun bit. Do you know Zimbardo's Second Rite?"

Mo pauses for a while. "I think so."

"Good, because we're going there. Don't worry, your part isn't hard. Let's get started."

After five minutes of minute adjustments, Williams runs a certain specialized script on his workstation, which starts up a sound track of chants in an esoteric language and sends a sequence of commands to the microcontrollers in the workbench. As the baritone voices intone meaningless syllables with the mindless precision of a speech synthesizer, he whispers to her: "Some visitors say it spoils the fun, but I rather think it's better than taking the risk of a slip of the tongue . . ."

A new image begins to fuzz into being in the screen, the drawn face of a male, fifty-something, wearing an expression of intent concentration."That's Dower," Mo confirms. "He wrote the report. Who do you get next?"

"Let's see. It'll cycle through the bearers soon enough . . ."

Dower's face is melting, morphing into a likeness. Mo's breath catches in her throat. "Shit."

"You get around, do you?" Williams sounds amused.

"No, I told you they're targeting me directly--" She stops, her voice rising. "It would be the best way to get the report out of Dower--send an agent who looks like me--"

"I believe you." The amusement drops from his voice. "Thousands wouldn't."

"Let them." She takes a deep breath. "Is there anyone else?"

"Wait." The face is fading, slowly. As it dims, Mo sees a faint shimmer about the eyes: the only sign that it may be a false sending. Whoever is behind the glamour is very good. "Come on, come on . . ." Dr. Williams murmurs under his breath.

Mo shifts her weight uneasily from one foot to the other, as she does when her feet are complaining about too many hours in smart shoes. She glances sidelong into the darkness, where the shadows are swirling and thickening. A faint spectral scatter of spillage from the violet laser shimmers across the wall. "Any res--"

She is in the process of turning her head back towards Dr. Williams and the workbench as the imago shudders and distorts, twisting into another's face.

Williams is meticulous, and doesn't cut corners. This is why he and Mo survive.

There's a crack like a gunshot, and two near-simultaneous bangs from the power supplies that feed the workbench: high-speed krytron switches short the output to earth. A rattle of broken glass follows, as shards from the diffraction screen and some of the pentaprisms follow. The synthesized voices stop. Seconds later, a thin wisp of smoke begins to curl from the top of the laptop.

"Sitrep," snaps Williams.

"Contained and uninjured. Yourself?" Mo raises a hand to her cheek. One finger comes away damp with blood: not uninjured. The pain hasn't reached her yet.

"Keep your goggles on and stay in the grid until I say you're clear." The smoke is nauseatingly thick. Williams reaches out with the perspex tongs and flips the light switch. "Thaumometer says we're grounded. Clear to step out of the grid." He demonstrates. "Damn, what a mess."

Mo swallows. "Is there a CCTV track?"

"What did I tell you earlier about images and computers . . . ? No, but we ought to be able to confirm whether it's your document." He sounds unhappy. "Did you get a glimpse of, of whatever that was?"

She nods. "Been there, done that."

"Countermeasures." Williams makes an obscenity of the word. "Does that tell you anything useful?"

"Yes." Mo picks up her handbag from the workbench on the opposite wall, hunting for a tissue. "Whoever's got the report knows what it is--and they're willing to fight to keep it." She draws a deep, shuddering breath. "Do you have a secure voice line? I need to make a call."

CLICK-CLACK. "DON'T MOVE."

I stand very still. The sound of a shotgun slide being racked at a range of less than three meters is a fairly good indication that your luck has run out--especially if you can't see where the shooter's positioned.

"Very good, Mr. Howard." The speaker is male, standing somewhere behind me. He's on the embankment, of course. Even the B-Team learn eventually. (Maybe I should have tried to shoot them the other night. And maybe I should cultivate my inner psychopath some more. Oh well.) "Do what I say and I won't shoot you. If you understand, nod."

I nod like a Churchill dog, thinking furiously. His accent is odd. Welsh? I can't place it.

"When I stop speaking I want you to slowly remove your pistol and place it on the ground in front of you. Then I want you to turn around. Do you understand?"

"But I'm not--"

"Did I ask you to speak?" His voice is icy. I shut up fast.

"If you understand, nod," he repeats. I nod. It's not my job to disillusion him about my imaginary invisible handgun. Like I said: the B-Team are more dangerous than the A-Team, just like sweating dynamite is more dangerous than Semtex. "Do it," he says. "Do it very slowly or I'll shoot you."

I very slowly lift the right side of my jacket, and mime unhooking a non-existent pistol from a non-existent belt clip. Then I lean over sideways until I nearly topple, and lower my hand towards the roots of a tree. Finally I straighten up--still moving slowly--and turn round, raising my hands.

My first reaction is, A man without a face is pointing a shotgun at me. Then I realize that he's glammed up, his head masked by a shimmer of random snapshots of other people, like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Other than that, he's wearing jeans and a gray hoodie--just like a million other men in and around this great capital city; the only deviant part of the ensemble is the tactical shotgun.

"Take two steps downhill, until you're on the path," he tells me. "Then kneel with your hands on top of your head."

My heart, barely under control a minute ago, is pounding, but I do what he tells me to do. Arguing with a shotgun isn't clever. I manage to kneel with my hands on my head--which is harder than you might think, when the ground's uneven, you're amped up on adrenaline, and you're over thirty--and wait.

"Don't move," he says. The sun beats down on us as we wait in a frozen diorama for almost a minute. Then I hear footsteps, and a jingling sound, from behind. "Don't move," repeats Mr. Faceless, as someone takes hold of my left wrist and clips one ring of a pair of handcuffs around it. "Got him, boss," says another male voice.

Shit, I think, tensing and ready to make a move if the opportunity presents--but they're not total idiots and they've already got my other wrist.

"Now lie down," says Mr. Faceless.

What can I do? I take a dive, making a controlled sprawl forward on the dusty cycle path. Thinking: They wouldn't be doing this if they were going to kill--Mr. Faceless's companion plants one knee on the small of my back and thrusts a sickly sweet-smelling wad of cotton under my nose--me . . .

The lights go out.

FROM THE VOICE TRANSCRIPT CALL LOG, NEW ANNEXE:

(Click.) "Angleton."

"Angleton? O'Brien here." (Pause.) "What have you done with him?"

(Pause.) "What?"

"Have you checked your email?"

"I don't believe--excuse me."

(Pause.) "Well?"

(Dry chuckle.) "He's a clever boy."

"And that's an interesting distribution list on the second message, isn't it. What have you set him up for this time?"

(Pause.) "A task I would perform myself, were I allowed to, my dear."

"Bullshit."

"No, you misunderstand. I am no more permitted to read the Fuller Memorandum than you are permitted to read and revise your own articles of service."

"But you sent Bob out with a, a fake . . ."

"Yes. He's the hare to lure the greyhound--or more accurately the mole--after him. I expect their identity will become clear tomorrow morning, in the course of the BLOODY BARON brown bag session. Which I for one can heartily recommend to you as the cheapest entertainment you'll see all week--"

"Angleton. Shut up."

"What?"

"You've forgotten something."

"Hm, yes?"

"Bob's been suspended on pay."

(Impatiently.) "Yes?"

"I called Boris."

"And what has that to do with the price of cheese . . . ?"

"Boris says his firearm was recalled. And he doesn't have a ward. He left it with me this morning. He's on the outside and he's naked. Have you heard from him?"

"No . . ."

"I tried to phone him a couple of minutes ago. His number is ringing straight through to voice mail."

(Pause.) "Oh."

"I think you'd better make sure that your greyhound hasn't actually caught your hare. Otherwise the Auditors are going to be handling a couple more enquiries."

(Icily.) "Are you threatening me?"

"You know better than that. I merely note that if Bob doesn't make it home tonight we can assume that CLUB ZERO have him. Which would rather blow the wheels off your little game with the BLOODY BARON committee, wouldn't it? Not to mention the collateral damage."

(Pause.) "Yes."

"So." (Pause.) "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to tell Major Barnes to put his merry men on notice--those of them who aren't playing cowboys and indians in the hills above Kandahar. Then I'm going to locate Bob. Alan can take it from there."

"I want to come along."

"I wouldn't dream of telling you to stay away, my dear, not with your specialist expertise. The problem is--"

"What problem?"

"I was building a waterproof case to hand over to Internal Affairs for prosecution before the Black Assizes. Trying to map the mole's contacts. Cultists are fragile: if they commit suicide we may never find their accomplices."

"Angleton. Would you rather lose Bob?"

"Hmm. If you must put it that way, no. But remember, in the endgame, we are all expendable."

"I'm so glad to hear it."

"As for you, would you like to make yourself useful?"

"How?"

"This little interruption has, as you reminded me, disrupted certain plans. But not, I hope, irretrievably. On your way to hook up with Alan's boys and girls, I'd like you to go and have a glass of wine with a friend of mine, and convey a proposition to him. It'll put me in his debt if he takes it, I'm afraid, but I think it's necessary. I'll email you the details."

"Who are you talking about?"

"Nikolai Panin."

(End of call log.)

I'M DREAMING.

I'm looking out across a wasteland of rolling ground, gray and crumbly as lunar regolith, beneath a starry sky. There's no vegetation, not even stunted cacti or lichen crawling across the rocks that dot the ground. In the distance I see a low wall, writhing across the landscape like a dead snake: it's as gray as the ground, too. The stars--

I can see at a glance that this is not Earth's sky.

A lurid band of orange and green swirls across half the void, bisecting it with a smoky knife a million times brighter than the Milky Way. The stars sprinkled across it are eye-stabbingly visible, several of them as bright and red as Mars. They cast a harsh and pale radiance across the sloping desert floor. This is not the skyscape of a planet quietly orbiting a star in the suburban spiral arms of a regular galaxy--I'm looking at the view from a world much closer to the active core of a galaxy or globular cluster. And it's an ugly, elderly galactic core, deep in the throes of senescence, a blaze of dust and gas spewing across the heavens from the dying exhalations of supernovae.

I try to turn my head, but my neck doesn't want to work. It's very strange--I can't feel my body. I don't seem to be breathing, or blinking, and I can't feel my heartbeat--but I'm not afraid. Maybe I'm dead?

In the distance, so far away that I can barely see it, low down and close to the horizon, the landscape takes a rectilinear turn. A shallow pyramid or volcanic mound as symmetrical as Mount Fuji reaches for the sky. I've got no way of telling how high it is, but instinct tells me it's vast, rising kilometers from the center of the flatlands. Something about it creeps me out, almost as much as the murdered sky. I've got a feeling about it, a sense of dreadful immanence. There's something inside the pyramid, something that has no right to exist in this or any other universe. I shouldn't be here, but the thing in the pyramid is even more out of its place and time. It's contained, that I know, but why it might need to be contained--

"--Told you not to overdo the ether! Can't you get anything right? If he's dead--"

The words buzz around my ears like meaningless insects, distracting me from the watch on the sleeper. The sleeper needs watching, demands witnesses who will collapse its quantum states and render it inert, incarnate in bosonic mass. I'm here because I'm part of the watch. They're scattered to either side of me, the White Baron's victims, impaled on stainless steel spikes, dead and yet undead, watching the sleeper. A massive sacrifice planned by the architect of terror to keep--

"--Got the smelling salts? Good--"

I can feel the pain gnawing at my abdomen, a deep and terrible burning pressure, and I'm on the edge of understanding that something awful has been done to me just as a horrible stench of cat piss steals up my nostrils and I feel a twitching in my eyelids.

"Is he responding?"

I understood that.

Abruptly, the dead plateau and the nightmare watchers and the sleeper in the pyramid are a million lightyears away from the headache that's stabbing at the back of my eyes, and the stench of ammoniacal smelling salts tickles my nose harshly, evoking a sneeze.

"Ah, that looks promising. Hello, Mr. Howard? Can you hear me?"

Fuck.

Suddenly wisps of memory slot into place. I find myself wishing I was back on the plateau, just another mummified corpse, another upright fencepost in the necromantic wall that hems in the pyramid. "Yuuuuh . . ." My mouth isn't working right; I'm slobbering like an out-of-control drunk, drooling incontinently. I blink, and the buzzing I've only just noticed recedes as I sense light and movement and chaos and an outside world that is acquiring color again.

"He's awake." The woman's voice is heavy with satisfaction. "All-Highest will be most pleased." As words to wake to, those leave something to be desired; but beggars can't be choosers. A boot nudges me in the vicinity of my right kidney. "You. Say something."

"S-s-something."

It's not as classy as you'll never get away with this or if it wasn't for you interfering kids . . . but I have an idea that I wouldn't enjoy Ms. Boot renewing her acquaintance with Mr. Kidney, and if there's one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it's that they don't have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned.

"Ow." That's for my head, which is now telling me in no uncertain terms that I'm nursing a ten-vodka hangover. Oh, and my wrists are handcuffed in front of me. I blink again, trying to see where I am.

I'm lying on my side on a thin foam mattress that's seen better days, in a small room with walls painted in that peculiar rotted cream color that landlords like to call Magnolia. They've removed my jacket while I was out for the count. There's a cheap IKEA chest of drawers and wardrobe, and a sash window half-masked by thin cotton curtains. Apart from the lack of a bed it could be just about any anonymous rented room in a shared flat--that and the two B-Team goons. Mr. Headless-Shotgun--who has left his trench broom somewhere else--nudges me in the back; another guy (young, blond, probably the friend with the handcuffs) is watching from the far side of the room, while the woman from the cycle path the other night squats in front of me, peering at my face. She's a twenty-something rosy-cheeked embryonic Sloane Ranger--the anti-goth incarnate--with bouncy ponytail and plumped-up lips quirking with humor beneath eyes utterly devoid of anything resembling pity. She probably shops in Harvey Nicks and dotes on her pony.

"It speaks," she declares, in a home-counties accent so sharp you could cut glass with it. "Pharaoh be praised."

Pharaoh? Bollocks. She's an initiate. Inner circle, then, which means I am potentially in a tanker-load of trouble. I try to clear my throat, but my head's throbbing and I still don't have full muscle control back. (Ether is vile stuff, as Hunter Thompson noted.) "W-w-water."

"Do you want some water?" Her face is instantly concerned. I try to nod. She gets the message. "Julian, fetch Mr. Howard some water." She doesn't look at Mr. Headless-Shotgun as she issues the order: she's focusing on me, with a strangely concerned look. "We wouldn't want him to get dehydrated."

"Yah. Er, Jonquil, should I fetch . . . ?"

His hesitant question brings a smile to her face. "Yes, a little aperitif would be good. Bring it."

Aperitif? I clear my throat as Julian Headless-Shotgun leaves through a door I can't see. "Drinking before you take me to the All-Highest? Isn't that a bit unwise?" It's a calculated risk, but her pink court shoes are a bit less likely to do Mr. Kidney an injury than Julian's size-twelve DMs.

"Oh, I'm not going to get drunk." She gives a little giggle.

Mr. Blond clears his throat: "You're the one who's going to be drunk."

"Oh do shut up, Gareth," Jonquil says tiredly.

"I'm just trying to explain--"

"Yes, you're very trying." Her world-weary tone suggests to me that Mr. Blond is definitely from the B-Team--unlike Jonquil, who has proven frighteningly competent, so far. "Why don't you go through Mr. Howard's jacket pockets instead, in case he's carrying any nasty surprises for us?"

"Yes, Dark Mistress. I live only to obey."

I must be slow today because it takes several seconds for the coin to drop. "You're not vampires, are you?" I ask, trying to stay calm; the prospect of falling into the clutches of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh is quite bad enough without accidentally crossing the streams with a bunch of live-action Vampire: The Masquerade fans--and you can never be too sure. (Cultists aren't usually noted for their tight grip on reality.)

"No!" She giggles again. "Vampires don't exist! We're just going to drink your blood and eat a teeny-tiny bit of your flesh, silly."

I can't help myself: I try and wriggle away from her. Which is fine as far as it goes, but as there's a wall about half a meter behind my back I don't get very far. "Why?" I manage to ask as Julian the Blood-Drinking Shotgun-Toting Cultist reappears with a bottle of Perrier, a scalpel, and a pair of unpleasantly fat syringes.

"Transubstantiation: it's not just for Christians anymore!" She sits on my back to stop me squirming away from Julian, then takes the scalpel and lays my left sleeve open from cuff to elbow. "Be a good boy and I'll let you have the water afterwards. This won't hurt much, if you don't struggle."

She sticks me on the inside of the elbow with the first needle, and pokes around for a vein with expertise that is clearly born of much practice. I grit my teeth. "Won't your All-Highest take exception to you sampling the buffet?"

"Mummy won't mind," she announces airily. "Next tube, Julian darling." She stabs me again, and this time there's a brief spark of searing pain as she nails a nerve. "It was her idea, actually," she says confidingly. "If your active service units find us and try to set up a geas to immobilize everyone but you, the law of contagion will keep us moving."

"Yeah," echoes Gareth from the other side of the room, doing his dimwitted best to keep up with the program.

I boggle slightly. "Would it change your mind if I said I was HIVPOSITIVE?"

She pauses for a moment, then points her nose in the air. "No," she says dismissively. "Mummy's seen your medical records, she'd have said. Don't tell lies, Mr. Howard, it will only get you into trouble." She passes the second syringe--turgid with purplish-red blood--up to Julian, then raises the scalpel. "Now this will hurt!" she announces as she bends over me with a curiously intent expression.

I swear for a few seconds. Then I give in and scream.

13.

THINGS THAT EAT US

AT SIX O'CLOCK , ANGLETON EMERGES FROM HIS OFFICE-- where he has been inexplicably overlooked by the searchers for the entire duration of his "disappearance"--and stalks the darkening corridors of the New Annexe like the shade of vengeance incarnate. A humming cloud of dread follows him as he passes the empty offices and the taped-over doorway in the vaguely titled Ways and Means Department. My office is, of course, empty: Angleton has rearranged meeting schedules in the departmental Exchange database to ensure that certain players will be elsewhere when he makes his way to Room 366.

There's a red light shining over the door, and a ward inscribed on the wood veneer beneath it glows gently green in defiance of the mundane rules of physics. Angleton ignores the DND light and the ward and enters. Faces turn. "James." Boris's face is ashen. "What are happen?"

(Boris isn't Russian and the accent isn't a fake; it's a parting kiss from Krantzberg syndrome, brain damage incurred by performing occult operations on Mark One Plains Ape computing hardware--the human cerebral cortex. Magicians use computers because chips are easier to repair than brains which have had chunks scooped out by the Dee-space entities they accidentally let in when they began to think too hard about those symbols they were manipulating.)

"The baited trap has been sprung," Angleton says lightly. He pulls out a chair and collapses into it like a loose bag of bones held together by his dusty suit. "Trouble is, our boy was holding the bait when they grabbed it."

"Oh bugger." Andy, tall and dandelion-haired as the famous graphic artist whose name he uses as an alias, looks distinctly displeased. "Do we know who they are yet?"

"Not yet." Angleton plays a scale on the invisible ivories of the tabletop, his fingertips clattering like drumsticks. "I was expecting to reel them in at tomorrow's BLOODY BARON meeting, but that might be too late."

"Where's Agent CANDID?"

Angleton grimaces. "I sent her on a little errand, en route to hook up with Alan Barnes and the OCCULUS unit. They're on station in Black-heath, ready to hit the road as soon as we give them a target. I've gone to the Board: they authorized an escalation to Rung Three. I have accordingly put CO15 on notice to provide escort and routing." CO15 is the Traffic Operational Command Unit of the London Metropolitan Police.

"MAGINOT BLUE STARS are in the loop and ready to provide covering fire if we need to go above Rung Five." The notional ladder of escalation's rungs are denominated in steps looted from Herman Kahn's infamous theory of strategic conflict: in a good old-fashioned war, Rung Five would mark the first exchange of tactical nuclear weapons.

"Is it that bad?" Boris asks, needy for reassurance. Even old war horses sometimes balk in the face of a wall of pikes.

"Potentially." Angleton stops finger-tapping. "CLUB ZERO is definitely getting ready to perform in London. The new research 'findings'"--Andy flushes--"are out in the wild and widely believed, and with any luck they've swallowed them whole and are going for broke this time. They successfully stole a report on Agent CANDID's weapon, which I admit I did not anticipate, and they think they've stolen the Fuller Memorandum."

There's a sharp intake of breath from Choudhury, whose previous stuffed-shirt demeanor has evaporated. "That's what the break-in was about?"

Angleton nods. "As I said, the baited trap has been sprung. They're going to try and steal the Eater of Souls, bind him to service and use him as a Reaper. I cannot be certain of this, but I believe their logical goal would be to break down the Wall of Pain that surrounds the Sleeper in the Pyramid. With the Squadron grounded we've had perilously little recon info on the state of the Sleeper for the past two years--the drone over-flights had to be suspended due to erratic flight control software glitches--and during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, awakening the Sleeper will be an obvious goal for the cultists. Of course, the logical flaws in Dr. Ford's report will take somewhat longer to come to light, and I am confident that even if they mounted such an attack it would fail, but the collateral civilian damage would be unacceptable to our political masters." His smile is as ghastly as any nuclear war planner's.

"Why has nobody nuked the pyramid?"

Angleton inclines his head as he considers Choudhury's question. "There is a contingency plan for the Squadron to fly such an operation," he admits. "But it probably won't work, and it might disrupt the Wall of Pain. Can we take this up later? I believe we have an operation to mount--tonight."

"Tell us what to do." Andy lays his hands on the table. They're white with tension. "Are we going to be able to recover Bob?"

"I hope so." Angleton reaches into his pocket and produces a small cardboard box. "Here is a standard paper clip. Until yesterday, it spent nearly five years at the back of a drawer, in close proximity to another paper clip, which is currently attached to the false Fuller Memorandum. The clips were stored in close proximity inside a Casimir amplification grid designed to boost the contagion field. It should be quite receptive right now." He places it on the conference table and produces a conductive pencil from his breast pocket. "If you will excuse me?"

Angleton places a sheet of plain paper on the tabletop, then rapidly sketches an oddly warped pentacle, with curves leading off from its major vertices. Next, he shakes the paper clip from its box into the middle of the grid. Then he produces a sterile needle and expresses a drop of blood from his left little finger's tip, allowing it to fall on the paper clip. Finally he closes his eyes.

"Somewhere on Norroy . . . Road," he says slowly. "Off Putney High Street." Then he opens his eyes. The glow from his retinas spills sickly green across the paper, but fades rapidly.

"Wouldn't it be simpler to use a GPS tracker?" carps Andy.

MEANWHILE: A WOMAN WITH A VIOLIN WALKS INTO A PUB.

An hour and a half has passed since Mo spoke to Angleton. She's been home to get changed and collect her go-bag, but still makes the meeting in a popular wine bar off New Oxford Street with time to spare, thanks to her warrant card and a slightly confused police traffic patrol. (External Liaison will raise hell about it tomorrow, but tomorrow can fend for itself.)

The middle-aged man in the loose-cut Italian suit is already there and waiting for her, sitting in the middle of a silent ring of empty tables while his dead-eyed bodyguards track the access routes.

"Mrs. O'Brien," says Panin. "Welcome."

She pulls out a chair and releases her bulky messenger bag, dropping it between her feet as she sits. She has her violin case slung across her chest, like a soldier's rifle.

"Dobryi viechier, kak ty?"

Panin's lips quirk. "Quite well, thank you. If you would prefer to continue in English ..."

"My Russian is very limited," Mo admits. "My employers are more interested in Arabic--not to mention Enochian--these days."

"Well, let us consider drinking to the bad old days, may they never return." He raises an eyebrow. "What's your poison?"

His English is very good. Mo shakes her head. "A lemonade. I don't use alcohol before an operation."

Panin glances over his shoulder. "A lemonade for the lady. And a glass of the house red for me."

"I didn't know they had table service here."

"They don't. Rank has its privileges."

They wait for a surprisingly short time. The minder delivers the drinks, as ordered, and retreats to his stool in the corner. "Angleton told you he was sending me," she says, tentatively laying out the terms of discussion.

"He did." Panin nods. "We share a common interest. Other agencies of our two great nations continue to bicker like bad-tempered children, but we must rise above, perforce. Alas, all is not always clear-cut." He reaches into his inside pocket and brings out a wallet, then produces a small portrait photo. "Do you recognize this man?"

Mo stares at the frozen face for several seconds, then raises her eyes to meet Panin's gaze.

"I'm not going to start by lying to you," she says.

Panin relaxes minutely--it is not evident in his face, but the tension in his shoulders slackens slightly. "He left a widow and two young children behind," he says quietly. "But he was dead before you met him."

"Before . . . ?"

"He was one of ours. I emphasize, was. Abducted two weeks ago, not thereafter seen until he appeared on your doorstep, possessed and controlled--we would say prievratilas', turned--a tool of the enemy."

"Whose enemy?"

Panin gives her a look. "Yours. And mine. James advised me to tell you that I have been involved in CLUB ZERO from another angle. The Black Brotherhood do not only fish in British waters."

"That's not news. Nevertheless, I hope you will excuse me for saying that if your illegals are taken while working overseas, blaming the local authorities is not--"

"He disappeared in St. Petersburg."

"Oh. Oh, my sympathies."

"I take it you can see the problem?"

"Yes." Mo takes a sip of lemonade, looks apprehensive. "I'd be very grateful if you could tell me everything you know about this particular incident. Did Ang--James--explain why it's of particular interest to us right now?"

"One of your mid-level controllers has been taken, no?"

"Not definitely, yet." Her fingers tense on the glass. "But he's out of contact, and there are indications that something has gone badly wrong, very recently. We've got searchers looking for him right now. Anything you can tell me before I brief the extraction team ..."

"You are briefing--" Panin's eyes unconsciously flicker towards her violin case. "Oh, I see." He eyes her warily. "What do you know of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh?"

"As much as anybody on the outside--not enough. Let's see: the current group first surfaced in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the establishment of the monarchy there, but their roots diverge: White Russian emigre radicals, freemasons from Trieste, Austrian banking families with secrets buried in their family chapels. All extreme conservatives, reactionaries even, with a basket of odd beliefs. They're the ones who reorganized the Brotherhood and got it back in operation after the hammering it took in the late nineteenth century. They're not based in Serbia anymore, of course, but many of them fled to the United States immediately before the outbreak of war; that's the trouble with these cults, they fragment and grow back when you hit them."

"Let me jog your memory. In America, they infiltrated--some say, founded--the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom as a local cover organization. They do that everywhere, taking over a splinter of a larger, more respectable organization; in Egypt they use some of the more extreme mosques of the Muslim Brotherhood. In America . . . the Free Church is a small, exclusionary brethren who are so far out of the mainstream that even the Assembly of Quiverful Providentialist Ministries, from whom they originally sprang, have denounced them for heretical practices. Some of the Church elders are in fact initiates of the first order of the Black Brotherhood; the followers are a mixture of Christian believers, who they see as dupes, and dependents and postulants of the Brotherhood. The Church is mostly based in the United States--it is very hard to move against a church over there, even if it is suspected of fronting for another organization, they take their religious freedom too seriously--but it has missions in many countries. Not Russia, I hasten to add. The nature of the Church doctrine makes the personal cost of membership very high--they tend to be poor, with large families--and discourages defection from the ranks; additionally, the Brotherhood may use low-level glamours to keep the sheep centered in the flock. We hear little more than rumors about the Brotherhood itself; despite fifty years of attempted insertions, we've been unable to penetrate them. Their discipline is terrifying. We have heard stories about ritual murder, incest, and cannibalism. I would normally discount these--the blood libel is very old and very ugly--but complicity in war crimes has been repeatedly used to bind child soldiers into armies in the Congo, and I have some evidence that those practices were originally suggested by a Brotherhood missionary ..."

Mo shudders. "Whether they eat their own children or not, they have no problem eating somebody else's."

"You have evidence of this?" Panin leans towards her eagerly.

"I've seen it." Panin flinches at the vehemence of her response. "Although they may not have been strictly human anymore, by that point--they had been thoroughly possessed--"

"That was the Amsterdam business, was it not?"

Mo freezes for several seconds. Then she takes another deep breath, and a hasty mouthful of lemonade, then wipes her mouth. "Yes."

"Cannibalism is a very powerful tool, you know. The transgression of any strong taboo--it can be used for a variety of purposes, bindings, and geases. The greatest taboo, murder, provides two kinds of power, of course, both the life of the victim and the murderer's own will to violate--"

Mo shakes her head, raises a hand. "I don't need that lecture right now."

"All right." Panin sips at his wine. "Excuse me, but--there is a personal connection?"

"What?"

"You appear unduly upset ..."

"Yes." She looks at her hands. "The missing officer is my husband."

Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Yes." She raises her glass and drains it, then puts it back on the table with a hard clack. "You can tell me anything you're at liberty to say, about why the Free Church attracted your attention. And what you think they're doing." She glances round. "Now might be a good time to check your wards." The bar is filling up, but the other after-hours drinkers are all crowding away from the table Mo and Panin share, as if a glass sphere encloses them.

Panin nods. "The ward is adequate," he assures her. "As for the Church, I need to tell you a story of the Revolution.

"During our civil war--the war that split families and slew the spirit of a nation, ending with Lenin's victory in 1922--many factions fought against the Reds; and as the traditional White leadership collapsed, strange opportunists sprang to prominence. In Siberia, there was a very strange, very wicked man, a Baron by birth, of German ancestry: Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, or Ungern Von Sternberg as he styled himself. Sternberg was a monster. An early obsession with Eastern mysticism warped his mind permanently, and then he found something . . . He was a personal friend of the Bogd Khan, a mass poisoner and coincidentally the Mongolian equivalent of the Dalai Lama. During the civil war, Sternberg ran an extermination camp near Dauria, east of Lake Baikal. The Whites used to send the death trains to Sternberg, and he used their cargo for his own horrible ends. It's said that there was a hillside in the woods above Dauria where his men used to kill their Red prisoners by tying them to saplings and quartering them alive. In summer, Sternberg used to go to that hill and camp there under the stars, surrounded by the bones and dismembered bloody pieces of his enemies. It was said by his soldiers that it was the only time he was at peace. He was a terrible man, even by the standards of a time of terror."

Mo is nodding. "Was he a member of the Brotherhood?"

Panin licks his lips. "Sternberg was not a worshiper of lath-Hotep; whenever he found such he slew them, usually by flogging until the living flesh fell from their bones. As a matter of fact, we don't really know what he was. We know what he did, though. It was one of the great works of pre-computational necromancy, and it took the priests of the Black Buddha to achieve it, fed by the blood and gore of Sternberg's victims.

"There are places where the wall between the worlds is thin. Many of these are to be found in central Asia. The Bogd Khan's gruesome midnight rituals--the ones he drank to forget, so heavily that he went blind--there was true seeing there, visions of the ancient plateau on an alien world where the Sleeper in the Pyramid lies sightless and undead. The Bogd was terrified. When his friend Ungern Sternberg offered him the sole currency that would buy relief from these visions--the lives of tens of thousands of victims--the Holy Shining One, eighth incarnation of the Bogd Gegen and Khan of Mongolia, fell upon his shoulder and wept bloody tears as he promised eternal friendship.

"The priests of the Bogd's court worked with Ungern Sternberg's torturers to build a wall around the pyramid, sent death squads shambling into the chilly, thin air on the Sleeper's Plateau to erect a fence of impaled sacrificial victims. No countermeasure to the Sleeper was created on such a scale for many years, not until your Air Force began their occult surveillance program in the 1970s. As for Sternberg"--Panin shrugs--"he went on to back the wrong side in a civil war. But that does not concern us."

"What an interesting story."

"Is it?" Panin looks at her sharply.

She shrugs. "I suppose if I say 'not really' you'll tell me why I'm wrong."

"If you insist." He snaps his fingers. "Another round, please." To Mo: "It is important. You see"--he waits for his minder to depart in the direction of the bar--"one of the tools used by the monks was a preta, a hungry ghost; a body in its custody could function on the Sleeper's Plateau far more effectively than any of Sternberg's men, who had a tendency to die or go mad after only a few hours. The hungry ghost needed bodies to occupy, though its kind is far more intelligent and powerful than the run-of-the-mill possession case. This particular hungry ghost knows the transitive order in which the Death Fence around the Sleeper's Pyramid was constructed--by implication, the order in which it must be de-constructed if the Sleeper is ever to be released. It was summoned by a ritual that Sternberg documented and sent west, for translation by the only woman he ever trusted: a trust that was misplaced, as it happens, because the document vanished into your organization's archives and has never been seen since. If the Black Brotherhood could get their hands on the document--I believe you call it the Fuller Memorandum--they might well imagine they could bind the hungry ghost into a new body, compel it to service, and order it to begin dismantling the Death Fence."

Mo nods jerkily. "Yes, that's very interesting," she says distractedly.

"If someone had convinced them that the time was right now, not in a couple more years, they might be induced to premature action. And if that someone allowed them to obtain a falsified, corrupted version of the Fuller Memorandum, they might well try to use it to release their master--"

Mo focuses. "The Sleeper. You're not saying it's N'yar lath-Hotep itself?"

"No, nothing that powerful: there is a hierarchy of horrors here, a ladder that must be climbed. But the thing in the pyramid can set the process in motion, starting a chain of events that will ultimately open the doors of uncreation and release the Black Pharaoh. To do so, they would best wait for the conjunction of chance; but it is in the nature of mortal cultists that they are impatient. And James is of the opinion that they should be encouraged to indulge their fatal impatience."

"I see."

"No, I don't believe you do. The Black Brotherhood are at their most dangerous when they work within an organization that is unaware it has been infiltrated. Your--husband. Has be been missing long?" She shakes her head. "Exactly. Something alerted you?" She nods. "James sent him on an errand, yes?" She nods again. "Imagine you are an initiate of the Brotherhood. You see an agent of a hostile organization, and you have acquired the Sternberg Fragment and are prepared to carry out the ritual of summoning and binding the hungry ghost. Would it not be to your advantage to pick, as a carrier, that hostile agent? So that you can send him back in among them, ridden by your own demon ..."

Mo's pupils dilate. Her face is pale. "You think they're going to try to possess Bob."

Panin spreads his hands palm-down on the table. "It is a logical supposition, nothing more." He meets her gaze. "He is tapped for rapid advancement, is he not? James's personal secretary, I gather. Years ago, he established a reputation as a casual layabout, a bit of a bumbler. It served him well in his field days. We see reports, you know. A very talented man, with a very beautiful, very talented wife. He will go far, if he is not eaten by a hungry ghost. Or worse."

"What could be worse?" Mo says bitterly.

Panin shrugs. "Firstly, they have a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. Whatever James saw fit to concoct, I suppose, not expecting them to perform it on his personal secretary. Secondly--the preta they wish to summon has already been summoned: it is, in fact, already walking around in flesh. Who knows what the ritual might dredge up, given a dangling pointer into the demon-haunted void? And thirdly ..."

"Thirdly?" Her voice begins to rise dangerously.

"We have merely been assuming that the copy of the Fuller Memorandum that James gave your husband contains a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. But James did not intend the situation to spin this far from his control. The worst possible case is that they have the real thing, the Sternberg Fragment and the document describing the binding of the Eater of Souls, and that they know what to do with it."

JONQUIL THE PSYCHOPATHIC SLOANE RANGER HACKS AWAY AT my arm for what feels like a year and is probably a bit less than a minute. Then she gets annoyed. "Julian, do something about the screaming, will you? It's giving me a headache."

Julian Headless-Shotgun pulls a leather glove out of one of his pockets and tries to stuff it in my mouth. I clamp my jaw shut, shivering and hyperventilating, but he responds by squeezing my nostrils painfully. After a few seconds I surrender to the inevitable. The glove fingers taste of sweat and sour, dead leather. Chewing on them helps.

Did I mention I've got a low pain threshold?

Jonquil goes back to hacking on my arm. The pain is excruciating. If you've ever been bitten by a dog--this is worse. The scalpel makes a clean incision, but I can still feel blood welling up and dripping along my arm. The pain isn't sharp--it's a widespread violent ache. After a while it feels as if my arm has been clubbed repeatedly with a meat tenderizer. She hacks and saws and tugs--the tugging is the worst, it's so bad my vision blurs and I feel light-headed--and then it stops.

But not the pain.

"He's bleeding. Gareth, fetch a sock and a bandage at once. And a plate."

I can't see very well: my eyes are blurring. I can't seem to get enough air through my nose, even when I blow out around the saliva-sticky glove. My heart is hammering and I feel sick with pain. There's a hole in my arm and it feels like it's about half a meter long and goes right down to the bone. I'm dying, I think dizzily, even though I know better. Jonquil and her muscle wouldn't want to risk their precious All-Highest's ire. I lie there moaning quietly for a while, then Gareth returns. "You, lie still," Jonquil says, and shoves what feels like a cast-iron cannonball into the hole in my arm. I try not to scream as she roughly winds a gauze bandage around the wadded-up sock, then stands up to inspect her work.

Julian bends over and holds a plate under my nose. Two red and blubbery lumps of raw meat about as long as my index finger sit in the middle of a thin pool of blood. "Anyone for sashimi?" he asks. Jonquil giggles; Gareth makes lip-smacking noises.

"Jolly good, that man." Julian's accent is plummy, camped-up; he peels one of the strips of meat off the plate and stuffs it in his mouth.

Jonquil follows suit, passing the plate to Gareth. "Nom nom nom," she says around her mouthful. "Chewy!"

Goatfuckers, I think fuzzily, then everything goes blank.

The next thing I know, Jonquil's hand is hovering in front of my nose. She's holding a couple of white cylindrical tablets. "Here, swallow these--oh." Her other hand tugs at the glove. I let go of it. She drops the tablets into my mouth, careful not to let her fingers close enough for me to bite. As if I would; all she'd need to do is breathe on that fucking hole in my arm. It's kind of hard to bite someone's fingers off when you're screaming in mortal agony. I try to spit the tablets out but she pinches my nostrils shut. "Naughty naughty!" I hold out until my lungs are burning, but there's only one way this contest of wills can end. "They're only pain-killers," she chides. "By the way, if you don't swallow them toot sweet I'll grind them up and inject them into you, there's a good boy."

Fucking Goatfuckers. She's entirely capable of making good on the threat; I swallow. "What do I taste like?" I ask, trying to distract myself.

"Like raw pork, only not as smoky. Want some? Oh, sorry: the boys have eaten it all." She giggles again. "Don't worry, give the Coproxamol time to work and you'll feel fine for your interview with Mummy."

My heart's still hammering, and I feel a little dizzy. My arm is cold and damp all the way down to my wrist. I don't want to think about how much blood I must have lost. Half a liter? More? Fucking bastard goatfucking cultists. I flash on a momentary fantasy, digging my thumbs into her eye sockets--but only momentary. I have a bad feeling about my right arm. It's throbbing like an overheated diesel engine, sending waves of pain radiating up to my shoulder and down to my elbow. I don't know whether I can bend it. Hell, I probably need surgery to repair what these fine young cannibals have just done. Anything that takes two arms--forget it.

"What are you going to do with me?" I ask.

"Patience, patience! You're going on a magical mystery tour! It'll be fun!" She turns to Gareth. "What's he got in his pocketses?"

"This." Gareth produces my wallet and opens it in her direction. She jumps back with a hiss as my warrant card falls out. "Ooh, nasty! You naughty boy!" She grabs the wallet and turns it round. "Credit card, debit card, driving license, library card, Tesco clubcard. Huh." She pulls out a solitary twenty-pound note. "Civil servant. Right."

Gareth and Julian seem to think it's funny. Civil servants shop at Tesco, don't have platinum credit cards, and suffer being eaten alive by cannibals in the course of their duty--and they think it's funny? A vast sense of indignation threatens to overwhelm me. Fucking bastard over-privileged snooty upper-class goatfucking cultists.

"Ooh, look! Shiny!" Gareth has found my NecronomiPod.

"What's that--ooh!" Julian leans over, and they nearly bang their heads together, cooing over the glamour-shedding curves of the JesusPhone. "Wow! Here, let me feel that--"

"Mine! Preciouss! Is it an iPod Touch?"

"No I think it's a--" Julian straightens up suddenly. "It's an iPhone, isn't it? How do you turn it off?"

I lie on the foam pad, a puddle of dizzy throbbing misery.

"Why would you want to switch it off?" Gareth demands.

"Because it's a phone. They can trace them, can't they?"

"Let's see ..." I hear a familiar sound effect as his finger finds the home key. "How does this work--ooh! Wow. What are all these icons?"

"I thought you knew--"

"Yes, but he's been messing with the home screen." Gareth finds the earbuds, untangles the white wires trailing from the jacket pocket. "Let's see what we've got here."

"Guys." Jonquil sounds tense. "We don't have time for this--"

I lie there, trying to be invisible, hoping Gareth is as stupid as he seems.

"It must have an off button somewhere," Julian mumbles. "Shiny ..."

"Mine!" Gareth clutches it possessively. The earbuds are wrapped around his hand, convolvulus climbing.

Jonquil clears her throat: "If you can't switch it off, leave it behind. It's time to go. Now."

"Bah." Julian shakes himself and steps back. Bastard, I think. "Put it down, Gareth--"

"Mine!" Gareth squeaks, and plugs the earbuds into his head as his thumb is inexorably dragged to the NecronomiPod's home button.

"Stop him--" Jonquil is too late, and she and Julian are clearly not B-Team members in my eyes because she steps behind Julian as he grabs up his shotgun and brings it to bear on Gareth--

Who is limned in black, dancing to a different beat as the writhing white wires drill deep into his consciousness through the shortest possible path, drilling and eating and consuming the unauthorized intruder who has had the temerity to plug himself into a device running a Laundry countermeasure suite--

And he's jitterbugging across the floor, a shadowy silhouette of his former self twitching as if he's plugged into a live wire. It only lasts for a couple of seconds, then the 'Pod finishes discharging its lethal load through his brain and Gareth's body drops to the floor, crashing across my legs like a dead weight.

The white earbuds roll away from his corpse, satiated and somehow fat.

"You bastard--" Julian is across the room and the shotgun muzzle is a subway tunnel filling my right eye.

"Stop!"

Julian takes a deep, shuddering breath. The gun doesn't waver.

"Gareth fucked up," Jonquil says shakily.

"Don't care. He's got to die." I can see a snarl building in Julian's chest, sense the tension in the set of his jaw. I've stopped breathing: if I move--

"Gareth failed the All-Highest." Jonquil is standing behind Julian now. "He was weak. He surrendered to a naff little glamour. Are you going to surrender to a stupid impulse, Julian? Are you weak? Do you want to hear what All-Highest will say if you damage the vessel?"

For a moment Julian does nothing--then he breathes out. "No." He squints at me along the barrel of his gun. "You're going to die, meat. And I'm going to watch you go." The shotgun swings away suddenly, pointing at the floor.

"What are we going to do with that?" he asks Jonquil, gesturing sideways at Gareth's body.

"Drag it downstairs and stack it with the others." She shrugs dismissively.

"The vessel's phone--"

"This for his phone." She kicks the NecronomiPod; it caroms off the wall and skids beneath the chest of drawers. "Gareth's safe to touch now. Get him downstairs."

"How are you going to move the prisoner?"

"I'm sure he can walk." Jonquil rests a hand on my right shoulder. I shudder. "You can walk, can't you, Mr. Howard? Please say you can walk? Because if you can't--" She moves her hand a couple of centimeters down my arm and squeezes.

"I can walk!" I yelp, gasping for breath. "Let me . . . up ..."

Julian grabs me under the left armpit--the undamaged one--and heaves me to my knees. I try to get my feet under me, and everything goes gray for a few seconds, but I don't faint. I'm just gasping for breath and dizzy, and a bit nauseous, and my right arm feels awful.

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