The B-team players we hire so we can keep an eye on them and protect them from the consequences of their own actions. The A-team players end up doing the protecting—both for the second-raters and for the Crown—defending the realm against things with too many tentacles and eye-stalks.
As for the second rule: if we employ everyone in the field, so to speak, then it follows that there are no external contractors. Anyway, external contractors would be a security risk. So even if there were external contractors, we couldn’t put them on the payroll without them taking the oath of allegiance, going the whole nine yards, etcetera. At which point, they wouldn’t be external.
As for the third rule…I’m guessing that’s where I come in. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself at this point.
HALF AN HOUR LATER LOCKHART COMES BACK AND REMOVES the dossier from my nerveless fingers: “Are you coming?”
“Uh? Lunch? Sure.” I struggle to my feet. “I’ll just get my coat.”
He picks up the dossier, adds it to another that he’s carrying—I spot the subject JOHNNY PRINCE on the cover before I force myself to stop—and turns to stash them in his large and exceedingly secure-looking office safe. I make myself scarce.
We meet downstairs, just outside the empty department store window. Lockhart flags down a passing taxi. We ride in silence: fifteen or twenty minutes to Wardour Street, in the heart of London’s Chinatown. Pocketing a receipt, Lockhart leads me through the crowd of shoppers to a surprisingly familiar destination, if only because it’s infamous: the Wong Kei. “We’re meeting here?” I ask.
“Where better?” Lockhart says ironically as he leads me inside. It’s lunchtime and deafeningly loud inside the landmark restaurant. I’m expecting us to end up queuing, but no: as if by magic Lockhart flags down a waiter, mutters something, and we’re whisked through a Staff Only door, into a cramped lift that squeals and grinds its way up to the third floor, then along a narrow passageway to a private dining room. He pauses before we enter. “The budget will only stretch so far.” But my reading of his mustache is getting better, and right now it spells: caterpillar is hungry for Cantonese.
The room is cramped, illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubes and a tiny window outside which throbs a bank of kitchen extractor fans. But the table is already laid out with chairs for four and a pot of jasmine tea on the lazy Susan. “Remember what I said,” Lockhart warns me, “keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Within reason. Understood?”
I nod, and mime a zipper. I’d normally put up more of a fight, but after reading the BASHFUL INCENDIARY file I find myself curiously uninterested in making a target of myself: she might turn me into a toad or something.
A minute later—I’ve just filled both our cups with steaming hot tea—the door opens again. Lockhart stands, and I follow suit. “Good afternoon, Ms. Hazard.” The caterpillar is delighted. “Ah, and the estimable Mr. McTavish! How are you today?”
Handshakes and smiles all round. I take stock, then succumb to a brisk flashback: a disturbing sense that I’ve met these people before.
McTavish is easy to pigeonhole, hence doubly dangerous: in jeans and a hooded top he looks like a brickie, except I know what the sidelong flat stare and the ridges on the sides of his hands mean. He reminds me of Scary Spice, one of Alan Barnes’s little helpers—specialty: ferreting down rabbitholes full of blood-drenched cultists and undead horrors. The resemblance isn’t perfect, but I’ve met NCOs in special forces before and he’s got that smell. Although there is a slight something else about him as well: he punches above the weight.
She, however—
“Charmed to meet you,” she says, and smiles, impish and vampish simultaneously. “I have heard so much about you, Mr. Howard! May I call you Bob?”
“I’m Bob to my friends,” I drone on autopilot as my brain freezes in the headlights. Stunning beauty in a minidress over black leggings, studiously casual yet somehow managing to send a bolt of electricity straight down my spine and drop my IQ by about fifty points on the spot…Yes, I’ve seen her like before. “That’s a nice glamour. Class two?”
Her smile freezes for an instant. “Class three, actually.” Then she lets it slip slightly and the starry soft-focus dissolves, and I’m merely shaking hands with a strikingly pretty dark-haired woman of indeterminate years—anything between twenty-five and forty—with Mediterranean looks and a dance instructor’s build, rather than a sorceress with a brain-burning beauty field set to Hollywood stun. “You have much experience of such things?”
“My wife doesn’t bother.” Is that a palpable hit? “But I’ve met them before, yes.”
Lockhart keeps a stony face throughout, but at this latter bit of banter he begins to show signs of irritation with me. “Bob, if you’d care to sit down, perhaps we could order some food?”
We sit down. I pointedly pay no attention to McTavish pointedly taking no slight at my pointed rejection of his mistress’s pointed—and unsubtle—attempt to beguile me. I’m somewhat disappointed. Do they think we’re amateurs or something?
“That was a very interesting service you sent us to last night,” Hazard tells Lockhart. She’s working on the English understatement thing, but her hands, expressive and mobile, give it away: she’s spinning exclamation marks in semaphore. “Absolutely fascinating.”
“Yes it was, wasn’t it?” Lockhart deadpans. He glances at McTavish. “You took a different angle, I assume?”
McTavish nods. “Penthouse and pavement.” His expression is oddly stony.
“Good—” Lockhart stops as the door opens. It’s one of the Wong Kei’s crack assault waiters, pad in hand. They’re famously rude; it’s all part of the service.
“You ready to order?” he barks.
“Certainly.” Lockhart is clearly a regular here. “I’ll start with the hot and sour soup…”
Two or three minutes later:
“Where was I?” Lockhart asks.
“You were grilling us about last night, as I recall,” says McTavish.
Hazard nods, eyes narrowing.
Lockhart glances at me briefly. It’s barely a flicker, but enough to warn me: The game’s afoot.
“Did you notice anything unusual about the, ah, performers?”
“What? Apart from the way they programmed the event to build the audience’s emotional investment in the key payload, then love-bombed them from fifty thousand feet with the warm floaty joy of Jesus?” Hazard props her chin on the back of her hand and pouts, sulky rather than sultry. “You should send Bob. He doesn’t like glamours. Do you, Bob?”
“Hey, it’s not you—it’s just that the last time someone put one on me I ended up buying an iPhone!” My protest falls on deaf ears.
“It’s not the glamour that interests me,” Lockhart says deliberately, “but the person it’s attached to.”
“You’re asking about Raymond Schiller, of the Golden Promise Ministries,” McTavish says lazily. “More like the Golden Fleece Ministries if you ask me, Duchess.”
“Mm, that tends to go with the territory.” Hazard is noncommittal.
“You didn’t see the average take in the collecting buckets at the back. Lot of people going short on luxuries this month, if you ask me.”
“The O2 Arena doesn’t rent for peanuts.”
“Unless it’s a charity loss-leader and they make up their margin on the food and entertainment franchises.” McTavish is a lot sharper than he looks. “Or someone with a glamour as good as Ray Schiller gets to the management committee.”
“Does he, ah, preach the prosperity gospel?” asks Lockhart.
“After a fashion.” McTavish’s lips are lemon-bitingly narrowed. “There are doctrinal shout-outs, dog-whistles the unchurched aren’t expected to notice. The prosperity gospel is in there, of course—it’s a Midwestern mega-church, after all. That’s what their appeal is all about. But there’s other stuff, too. It put me in mind of the church of my fathers, and not in a good way.”
“You didn’t sa
y that last night.” Hazard sits up. The door opens as a pair of waiters appear, bearing trays laden with soup and starters. She continues after they leave, addressing Lockhart: “It was a very non-specific love-bombing, but it was a very public evening. I thought it was a recruiting drive for foot soldiers rather than a second-level indoctrination aimed at officers. Very skillful, though.”
“I’d use a different word for it,” McTavish says darkly.
“Yes?” Lockhart focusses on him.
“You’ll have read my file.” McTavish winks and picks up a prawn toast. “Let’s not disrespect the food, eh?”
As I dive into my chicken and sweetcorn soup I’m trying to place Hazard’s accent. It’s not remotely American, but not British, either; there’s a hint of something central European, but it’s been thoroughly scrubbed—all but erased—by very expensive speech training.
“Ray is an interesting character,” Lockhart explains over the starters. “We don’t know much about him. US citizen, of course; he came out of Texas, but his background is rather vaguer than we’re happy about. There’s a worrying lack of detail, especially about what he did before he found Jesus in his mid-twenties and joined the Golden Promise Ministries, back when it was a converted shack in the Colorado mountains.”
“Aye, well.” McTavish is busy with his ribs—I can’t tell whether he’s genuinely hungry or using them as a smoke screen—but Hazard is suddenly abruptly intent on Lockhart, her gray eyes as tightly focused as a battleship’s range-finder. “You think…”
Lockhart clears his throat. “Please don’t say what you’re about to say. I’m implying nothing, Persephone. There’s no evidence and there are no witnesses—none we’ve been able to locate. I may be barking up the wrong tree. Nevertheless, we are concerned.”
“I am not sure I see why,” she says slowly. “As long as he simply takes the marks for their marks, what’s the problem?”
Johnny McTavish has gone very still and very distant, gaze fixed and unblinking in a sniper’s thousand-yard stare. A cold chill runs up and down my spine. I’m the only person at this table who hasn’t been fully briefed on whatever is being spoken of here, and I feel horribly exposed, because I’ve read enough of the BASHFUL INCENDIARY dossier to know what Persephone is capable of, and Johnny is her lieutenant—and I suspect the subject of the other dossier, the JOHNNY PRINCE one I saw on Lockhart’s desk—which means he shouldn’t be underestimated either.
“Did you stay for the laying on of hands?” Lockhart asks after a moment.
“Yes.” Her eyes narrow. “And the speaking in tongues, and the reeling and writhing. Thank you very much.”
Johnny is pointedly silent and dour.
“Did they say anything interesting?” Lockhart leans forward.
“Hard to tell.” She frowns. “Glossolalia is always hard to follow, even with my—assets. The music and chanting and clapping and cheering from the back, they make it really hard to hear. But if I had to guess, I think—I might be wrong—it was all coming through in High Enochian. And one lady in particular—she was facing in my direction as the Holy Spirit took her—she was calling, He is coming, he is coming, over and over. And it was definitely in that tongue.”
Johnny looks up and nods. “The faith of my fathers, for sure,” he says quietly. “I could feel the siren song in my blood.”
“Well that tears it.” Lockhart looks at me sourly.
“What?” I say, surprised.
“Gerry, would you mind explaining, preferably in words of one syllable, just why this particular hedge-wizard occultist turned preacher-man is suddenly a person of interest to Her Majesty’s Government?” Hazard stares at Lockhart, openly challenging.
Johnny looks uncomfortable. “Duchess—”
Lockhart shakes his head. “That’s the wrong question.”
“What’s the right one, then?”
“The right question,” he pauses for a final mouthful of soup, “is why Her Majesty’s Government has suddenly become of interest to Raymond Schiller. And in particular, why our prime minister is hosting a prayer breakfast for the pastor the day after tomorrow.” He puts his spoon down and fixes Hazard with a chilly stare. “There are aspects of Pastor Schiller’s mission that were not on display at the arena. Call it the uncut, X-rated version of yesterday’s PG performance. As you can imagine, we find his faith disturbing.”
McTavish fixes me with a lazy smile. “Are you a man of faith, Mr. Howard?”
“In a manner of speaking.” I use my napkin to wipe my lips while I work out how much I can say without Lockhart putting me on latrine duty afterwards. “I’m fully aware of the One True Religion. I know where I stand with respect to it.” I stare right back at him. “And I know what to do with worshipers when I find them.”
His smile widens. “We must get together and compare notes some time.”
Hazard cuts across us: “If you gentlemen have quite finished? I believe we still have a main course to eat.” She smiles indulgently. “You can continue plotting deicide later. I, for one, am looking forward to the Hoisin duck…”
Jesus, that woman’s got a strong stomach, I think as the waiters come to clear away our starters and Lockhart looks at me and gives a stiff, very quick nod.
Little do I suspect what’s in store for dessert.
5.
BASHFUL INCENDIARY
I KEEP MY GOB SHUT UNTIL WE GET BACK TO LOCKHART’S OFFICE. He shuts the door and flips the security lamp switch—to warn passers-by not to enter—then turns to me. “Sit down, Mr. Howard. I must congratulate you on not giving away the entire kitchen sink, along with the silver teaspoons…”
I sit on the edge of the hard visitor’s chair. I will confess to a slight degree of tension. There will be an exam: no shit, Sherlock. The real question is, who is examining whom?
“Do Operational Oversight know about this?” I ask bluntly.
Lockhart’s response is characteristically terse. “They aren’t cleared to supervise Externalities. We answer directly to Mahogany Row. The Auditors keep an eye on us, in case you were wondering about accountability.”
Great. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any dicier, it turns out we’re going behind the backs of the folks normally charged with keeping us on the straight and narrow, because the Big Bad themselves are giving us the hairy eyeball. “So, let me see if I’ve got things right…You’ve got wind of a televangelist who is in too tight with the Prime Minister. He’s got, at a minimum, some rudimentary talent; at worst, he may be a cultist. The PM is completely and utterly off-limits, so we’re going to set up a surveillance op that bypasses Operational Oversight specifically so we can violate our organization’s equivalent of the prime directive. Right?”
“Not exactly.” The caterpillar is unamused. “We are going to obey the letter of the law, Mr. Howard, and don’t you forget—”
“I’m so glad to hear that—” I begin before I realize he’s got more to say: “I’m sorry?”
“What did I tell you about using your ears?” I bite my tongue and give him the nod he’s waiting for. “When you’re not filling the external assets’ ears with your own opinions…anyway. As I was saying, we are bound to obey the law. The Laundry does not snoop on the PM or his associates. Caesar’s wife and all that. Nor does the Laundry employ external contractors.”
Then what was lunch about? I manage not to ask; instead I nod, trying to fake a thoughtful expression.
“It is possible that from time to time outside interlopers who, I emphasize, do not work for the Laundry, and who feature nowhere in our org chart, might take an interest in people associated with Number Ten. Wild cards, loose cannons.” Lockhart aims for the arch expression of a Sir Humphrey Appleby: on his round face it looks as authentic as a six pound note. “In which case we would of course be required to investigate them: strictly to ensure that the PM’s security was not violated, you understand.”
“Outside interlopers like BASHFUL INCENDIARY and her pet thug?” I st
are at him in ill-concealed disbelief.
“You appear to be slightly perturbed.” Lockhart walks behind his desk and sits, stiffly. “Would you care to explain why, Mr. Howard?”
You gave me the dossier—I flap my mouth: noises come out. Get a grip, Bob. “Where shall I start?”
“At the beginning.” Lockhart laces his fingers together. “Tell me about BASHFUL INCENDIARY, then explain why you are uneasy.”
“Huh. Okay, then. We have a woman with no history before the age of eight. She first appears on the scene in Bosnia during the war, already aged eight, via a refugee camp. Doesn’t speak and is believed to be mute. After four months in the camp a couple of teenage thugs try to rape her. The UN peacekeepers notice the aftermath of the incident but write it off as a freak accident; by the time someone asks what sucked the soul out of two gangbangers, she isn’t there anymore. To this day, it’s an open question—precocious talent or a protective agency? There are isolated reports over the next two years. Living with a family of Roma in Albania, caught begging in Trieste, shoplifting in Milan. She slips through the net every time. Then, a year later, the trail firms up. She is formally adopted by Alberto and Marianne di Fonseca, whose lawyers convince the magistrate that despite the lack of paperwork it’s in the kid’s best interest for her to have a stable, loving, and fairly well-off family.”
I take a deep breath. “The di Fonsecas are persons of interest: a professor of theoretical mathematics and a former fortune teller with a reputation as a witch. He’s titled—duke of a historic statelet that hasn’t existed since the eighteenth century. There’s old money and influence there, not to mention his membership in a politically influential but very secretive masonic lodge—”
Lockhart makes a cutting gesture: “Fast-forward, if you please.”
“Okay. Our ten-year-old girl is enrolled in an expensive Liceo Scientifico where her academic performance goes from subpar in the first year to meteoritic in the second and subsequent. By fifteen she was taking her, ah, diploma di scuola superiore—ready to enter university four years early. Wednesday Addams, the Italian remix: a quiet, reserved pupil, doesn’t make many friends, spends holidays at home with her adoptive parents. Pay no attention to the word among the local lads about town that she’s a, a succubus; probably she’s just very good at creeping out teenage boys who hit on her.
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