Anything—why is he asking—realization blinks on like a five-hundred-watt light bulb. “Oh, yes, yes there is.” I explain about Pete and the apocrypha and my misgivings about the whole business, and he nods every thirty seconds throughout the whole sorry story. Finally I wind down. “That’s what you were after, right?”
He’s silent for a few seconds, then finally nods again. “Yes, Mr. Howard, it was. Thank you for telling me. I’ll take the matter under advisement. We may have to call you in for a formal debriefing, but in view of the circumstances I don’t think you have much to worry about.” He stops. “You have reason to believe otherwise?”
I nod, glumly. “My wife will be furious when she finds out.”
“Hmm.” He cocks his head to one side, watching me. “Don’t you suppose she would be even more upset if you got yourself killed and failed to stop Schiller waking the Sleeper?”
“Uh—maybe.” There are some domestic disagreements you can’t win: it’s in the rules, or something. “If I was allowed to talk to her about it—Lockhart overrode our usual waiver.”
“Well, if you have any trouble, talk to me and I’ll see if it’s possible to override that. Meanwhile, CANDID will come round eventually,” says the Senior Auditor. “She has a level head on her shoulders.” He clears his throat. I barely have time to flinch, just as my younger self did whenever he heard the dental drill spinning up; he’s a deft touch, is our Senior Auditor. “Now, as to why I’m really here, I’d like you to accompany me upstairs to a personnel hearing in one of the executive offices.”
TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS EARLIER:
“Hurts like a motherfucker, Duchess,” Johnny opines, touching the dressing taped around his throat. He wears an open-necked dress shirt, the better to conceal its alarming proportions from casual witnesses.
“I’m not surprised.” Persephone doesn’t move her head or shift her hands from the steering wheel, but he can see her gray eyes flicker to examine him in the rearview mirror. “Try not to do that, Johnny. It takes longer to heal if you stress it.”
“I thought I was dead for keeps this time.” He shudders. “And Schiller was going to resurrect me.” He leans back in the leather-and-walnut embrace of Schiller’s Lincoln limousine and focusses on the back of her head. Her hair is tied in a chignon beneath a chauffeur’s cap that matches her black suit as she drives steadily towards the rising sun. There are more strands of gray in it than there were just a week ago. Nevertheless, she drives like a machine: over the night just past they’ve covered nearly seven hundred miles.
“Sorting you out when you get yourself killed is my job,” she says, exposing a flash of jealousy. “You didn’t think I’d leave you to him, did you?”
Johnny shrugs, then winces in pain. “Looked a bit hairy for a few minutes there, Duchess. This retirement caper isn’t as peaceful as I expected.” She doesn’t reply. Miles pass, then he tries again: “Seems to me if it wasn’t for Howard we’d both be in the shitter. It’s a total clusterfuck.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Lockey and his backers suckered us. They suckered everyone too damn well. Assuming the fish ain’t rotting from the head down, he locked the Black Chamber out before they even realized they had an incursion. If he hadn’t tried to overreach hisself by fishing in our backyard…” Johnny’s thousand-yard stare is focussed far beyond the vanishing point of the highway ahead. “An’ then the old poacher-gamekeeper match-up turned sour on us.”
“You’re assuming he didn’t do that deliberately. Play us for idiots right down the line.” Persephone is silent for almost five minutes. Her expression is distant. “He got Mahogany Row’s attention, and they sent us. Do you suppose it was deliberate? That he’d worked out that we’d have the right kind of asset and trailed himself through London just to ensure that someone like you would show up on his doorstep?”
Johnny’s eyes widen in surprise. “I really hope not…!”
“Oh yes.” Her face in the mirror is pale. “At least, Lockey didn’t deny it. The bloodline is rare outside of the western isles. And the organization’s done a good job over the past few decades of ensuring that the believers don’t stray, and the stray don’t believe. But Lockey only needed two of you—Schiller and someone else—to make it work. I’m thinking we were set up.”
Johnny digests this for a minute. Then: “Schiller’s dead.”
“I would say so, yes. At least, he was on the wrong side of the gate when I unplugged the generator that was powering the control node. Along with whatever he managed to awaken.”
“The Sleeper? It’s awake?”
“Probably. Maybe. I was very much afraid that it was finally stirring from its sleep when I went back through the gate, and it certainly seemed restless.” Her knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. “It’ll be weak, though. To wake it is the easy part—feeding it until it’s strong enough to act is the hard bit. That’s what the mass sacrifice was about. It may be awake but right now it’s trapped in the temple, barely conscious, with nothing to feed on but Raymond Schiller. And if the Nazgûl thought they could control it, they’re going to learn otherwise really soon.”
“So, what now?”
“What, next, you mean?”
“Don’t act the ingenue with me, boss, it won’t wash.”
“We go home.” Her voice is tired. “We conduct the post-mortem. Then we dig in for the phony war.”
“Ah.” His eyebrows rise with enlightenment. “You think it’s going that way?”
“I am certain of it.” He sees her frown in the mirror. “At least we got out of there alive. What did you think of Mr. Howard’s performance?”
“’E came through better than I expected, keeping up with you, Duchess. Is ’e still alive?”
“Probably. I passed him on the way out. Unconscious.” She pauses. “He’s got potential. If only he can get over his squeamish side he’ll be a very useful asset. And I think we can work on that.”
“So you’ve made up your mind, have you? Despite the aforementioned clusterfuck?”
“Yes. We’ve got to take talent where we can find it, and it’s not Howard’s fault the mission was a qualified failure.” She taps the fingers of her right hand on the wheel boss. For a moment there’s a flash of bitterness in her eyes. “You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default.”
“A HEARING?” I MANAGE NOT TO SQUEAK. “DO I, UH, WOULD I be advised to ask for an advocate? Or legal advice?”
“It’s not that kind of hearing.” The Senior Auditor actually looks cheerful. “You’re not in the frame for GOD GAME BLACK running off the rails. In fact, you’ve come out of it smelling of roses. Or, at least, not covered in sewage. For one thing, you survived. For another thing, so did the executives you were sent to support.”
“But what about—”
“Come on.” He stands up. “You’ve already worked most of it out for yourself, but we still have some procedures to go through, forms to file, that sort of thing.”
“Forms for what?”
“Forms for Human Resources to document your permanent transfer to External Assets as an executive assistant. BASHFUL INCENDIARY’s report on your performance was quite positive, and you seem to have come through Gerald Lockhart’s stress test with acceptable results. The one thing everyone who has ever supervised you agrees on is that you’d be wasted in middle management. So you’re not going there. Instead, you’re being diverted onto the other career ladder, the one most people in the organization don’t know about.
“Welcome to Mahogany Row, Mr. Howard. And may whichever god you choose to believe in have mercy on your soul.”
Table of Contents
Prologue Office Job
1. Bloodstone Caper
2. Skills Matrix
3. Big Tent
4. External Assets
5. Bashful Incendiary
Interlude Absolution
6. Jet Lag
7. Communion
8. Omega Course
9. Speaking In Tongues
10. Things To Do In Denver When You’re Doomed
11. The Apocalypse Codex
12. With A Bible And A Gun
13. Fimbulwinter
14. Appointment In Samarra
15. Black Bag Job
16. The Resurrection And The Life
Epilogue Aftermath
Classified Appendix
The Apocalypse Codex Page 36