“But it’s a really bad idea to play that kind of game,” I complain. “What if it was—”
She looks at me impatiently. “You did just fine. What you don’t know they can’t get out of you if they put you under oath and start asking questions. Anyway, they had three victims in that chair yesterday and another scheduled to go on fifteen minutes after you left. If you did it right it’s sterile.”
“Who do I raise it with? Through proper channels?” I add sarcastic emphasis. I’m not a goddamn errand boy these days and if they want someone to do a plumbing job we’ve got an entire department for that. Burning your shiny new PR guy’s cover by handing him a gray task on his first time out is really not how we’re supposed to operate, unless you’re planning on firing him the very next day. Although on second thought, we’re so shorthanded right now—
“Send a memo upstream; am will forward it,” Boris offers. I stare at him. Okay, so that’s why they sent you along, is it? I nod.
“Beer,” I say grumpily, and take a long pull from my bottle. “If I’m going to make a fool of myself in public, at least I deserve a beer afterwards.”
“You didn’t make a fool of yourself; I think you did quite well,” Mhari says. “Now can we please change the subject?”
“Make that two beers, and I’ll just stand in the corner in my jester’s cap.” I really hope she’s trying to keep my morale up; the last thing I want is a permanent public relations assignment.
“You should talk to Mo,” Mhari suggests unexpectedly.
Stung, my mouth runs ahead of my brain: “I don’t need your that’s a good idea actually…” I get as far as pulling out my phone before a glance at the screen tells me it’s a bad idea: it’s six minutes past midnight already. I might be living in Beer Standard Time, but Mo has just spent last week off-grid in a cottage down at the Village, getting away from it all. She’s back at work this week, and I’m certain she’ll be burning the candle at both ends catching up with the backlog. She won’t thank me for waking her up in the middle of the night for a drunken chat. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
“Definitely tomorrow.” To my surprise Mhari reaches across the table and grabs onto my fingertips. “This isn’t good for either of you. You should talk to her.”
I pull back, but her grip tightens. After a moment I stop. “Why the sudden concern?”
She hesitates momentarily. “I like Mo and I have to work with you. She’s been in a bad place recently and you weren’t there for her, and now you’re heading for a bad place too, and”—she lets go of my hand and shrugs again, her shoulder pads miming a vampire princess’s bat wings—“I’m just concerned.”
I can’t hold back a slightly bitter smile. “So, no hidden agenda.”
“No, Bob, no hidden agenda.” Her answering smile is full of history. Hers, and mine (we were an item for a while, back before I met my wife). “As I get older I find friendship gets ever more precious.” She’s my age, but she could pass for late twenties. She used to be pretty but when she got PHANG syndrome she turned supermodel glamorous: it’s as if she’s aging backwards, living along some sort of femme fatale eigenvector that’s iteratively converging on Big Sleep–era Lauren Bacall. “I can see where we’re going more clearly these days. I don’t want to hit eighty on my own.”
“To friends.” I raise my drink to cover my confusion. The beer’s running low so I wave my hand for a third (and final) bottle. Mhari has always been better than me at people skills. It’s taken me this long to appreciate her for what she is, now that we’re not going at each other like a pair of cats with their tails tied together.
“Absent friends,” grunts Boris, surfacing from his whisky. He waves for another.
“Friends dead, alive, and undead.” Her eyes glance sidelong around the bar, scanning. When she’s sure it’s safe, she continues: “You realize this isn’t over, don’t you?”
I put the empty bottle down. Can’t get away from it, can I? “Yes.” The waitress is on her way: either it’s a quiet night or my Obtain Bar Service feat just leveled up alarmingly. When she departs I continue. “Someone in the Cabinet Office will have seen it for sure. Questions will be asked, it’ll be on the PM’s morning briefing, and I’ll be up before the beak, won’t I?” Boris chuckles and Mhari giggles. “So I assume we’ll be debriefing first…” Then, right on cue, Mhari’s phone buzzes.
“Yup: looks like we have a meeting scheduled for nine hundred hours, Room 406, chaired by the Senior Auditor.” Mhari frowns. I wince slightly at the specter of the SA. He’s not someone you want to get on the wrong side of. I must look aghast because she adds: “Mo is on the invite list, so I’m pretty sure this is not about you.”
“What?”
“Trust me, if the Auditors were planning a Bob roast they wouldn’t invite your wife to the barbecue.” Then Mhari glances up from her smartphone screen, and despite the reassuring words she looks troubled: “He’s booked half the Audit Committee, plus Vik Choudhury and a couple of heavy hitters from the Executive Committee. It’s all very Mahogany Row; I can’t figure it out. But they wouldn’t roll the Senior Auditor out to chair it if this was anything less than critical, don’t you think?”
“Well fuck.” I pick up my third (and, I remind myself, final) beer. “You know what this means.”
Boris looks at me, then Mhari looks at me, and we chorus: “The reward for a job not fucked up is another job.”
* * *
I finish my beer and dutifully stagger off to my hotel room, while Mhari returns to the office—she works the night shift these days—and Boris heads home. I assume he has a home. Right now, I don’t. I live out of a suitcase pretty much constantly. I’m traveling so much that Accounts doesn’t even blink at my subsistence claims any more. I’m in London so little that it’s cheaper to pay for the odd hotel night using loyalty points than to find a permanent room somewhere, and I’m still hoping to patch things up enough to go home.
But in the here and now, I am coming to hate liminal spaces like airport terminals and hotel rooms.
Sleep takes a while to arrive. I can dimly sense the minds and dreams of the other hotel guests around me: walls and floor and ceiling are no barrier to souls. It’s kind of soothing. Some insomniacs count sheep. I keep separate tallies of shaggers, porn channel junkies, and insomniacs. Eventually I manage to tune my brain to the slumber channel and drift off for a few hours, untroubled by the usual nightmares.
Morning arrives much too soon in the shape of a bleeping hotel alarm clock and a DJ on Capital Radio yattering excitedly about somebody’s new album, and how the London stock exchange is reopening and sterling seems to have arrested its slide because the Chancellor is pointing a fire hose of Treasury money at the smoking wreckage of West Yorkshire. It is still unclear whether the Secretary of State for Defense is going to fall on his sword; he seems to be trying to hang on, but the Prime Minister has just said that he “has complete confidence” in him, and you know what that means. I turn the radio off and shamble in the direction of the shower cubicle.
This is an office day rather than a public speaking gig, so I throw the suit in the suit carrier, pull on combat pants, tee shirt, and hoodie, and check my email and calendar schedule over a full cooked hotel breakfast. I’m still yawning as I check out and catch a bus to the office, and I’m nearly there when I realize I’ve forgotten to shave and my shaver is in the bottom of the suitcase left in the left-luggage room back at the hotel. Great.
Our temporary headquarters is the New Annex, which we moved into for six months just over five years ago. It’s still in use even though Facilities has been unable to get the bloodstains out of the walls and its security is terminally compromised. The first HQ redevelopment stalled due to site contamination, then the fallback plan—a new headquarters up the M1 in Leeds—was trashed less than two weeks ago, along with the rest of Leeds city center. London property prices are so nosebleedingly insane that we can’t even find temporary quarters in the capital, so we’re stuck wi
th the New Annex even though it’s unfit for purpose and should be demolished.
But the past weeks have brought changes, some of them externally visible. We didn’t have armed police standing by the entrance before, making it obvious that we are something more important than a fly-by-night call center operation. Now we’ve got two of them, and they’re not your regular SO19 bods, either: they’re wearing matte black Imperial Stormtrooper gear with Metropolitan Police badges, full face helmets, and really scary-looking guns instead of the usual assault rifles. They check me for tentacles and I show them my warrant card, then they let me in. Security, we haz it: rah. Only I fumble and drop my card, bend to pick it up, and realize I showed them my driving license by mistake.
The main staircase is closed off above the ground floor so I have to take the indoor fire escape up to the fourth floor to get to the designated meeting room. It’s a steep climb so when I reach the second-floor landing I pause to dump my suit carrier and messenger bag in my office, then grab a mug of what passes for coffee from the kitchenette next door to the number three briefing room.
“Hey, Mr. Howard! Have you got a minute?”
I manage not to spill my coffee. It’s one of the new guys, from Facilities: young (was I ever that young?), eager (was I ever that enthusiastic?), and unaware that it is a really bad idea to startle a DSS before he’s had his morning coffee. “Yes?” I demand, my pulse slowing, quite proud of myself for neither grunting nor snarling.
“Um, hi, I’m Jon, and I’m supposed to be auditing the network cable runs for the Ops offices in this wing because there’s this overdue requirement for a structured cabling refresh, and I need to get access to your office so I can inspect the junction box and make sure it’s properly terminated?”
Jon has a hipster beard and wears thick-rimmed glasses and a checked shirt with a button-down collar that doesn’t quite conceal his tattoos, but in every other respect it’s eerily like looking at myself in a time-shifted mirror set to fifteen years ago. I find it oddly depressing. He seems eager to please, and killing him would result in altogether too much paperwork of an excruciatingly dull variety, so I just shake my head. “I’ve got a meeting in five minutes, but I can fit you in afterwards—knock on my office door around eleven thirty?”
“Sure!” He nods happily.
A thought strikes me. “By the way, if I’m not in my office you mustn’t try to gain entry without me. I keep hazardous materials there. Stuff that might scramble your mind if you get too close.” Actually it’s all in a secure document safe full of catatonia-inducing memos, protected by wards that will set fire to the contents if anyone meddles with them, causing the badly maintained sprinklers to go off, but there’s no need to tell him that. “Also, if you need to gain access to Mr. Angleton’s room—down J Corridor and along, it’s at the bottom of the stairwell next to the chained-up fire exit—fetch me. Same warning applies, except he used nukes while I make do with hand grenades.”
It’s not until I’m back on the fire escape, trudging upstairs to my meeting with the SA and other members of the Mahogany Row Oversight board, that I realize the kid’s got my old job.
* * *
Mahogany Row refers both to the furnishings on the executive floor of our original HQ building2 and to the folks who use those offices: senior management, Auditors, external assets, Deeply Scary Sorcerers, and other questionable types. I’m technically one of them these days, although I’m fucked if I know why. The main qualifications seem to be exhibiting an aptitude for ritual magic or executive leadership, and not dying on the job. At least that’s how the organization got started, back when it was the Invisible College and nobody really knew how this stuff worked. The Laundry as it now exists sprang up during a wartime emergency and was subsequently repurposed to provide backup for the Deeply Scary Sorcerers. Anyway, I have never felt at ease in the thick-pile carpeted corridors and offices full of antique furniture and paintings from the Government Art Collection. It feels like a very exclusive gentlemen’s club, and I’m the kind of oik who would be blackballed if he wasn’t useful to have around.
I make it to Room 406 on the spot of nine. Dr. Armstrong is already sitting at the front, calmly sipping tea from a fine china cup. There’s a big TV screen and DVD player on a stand in one corner, presumably so we can all have a good laugh at me making a fool of myself. As I hunt for a seat that doesn’t make me feel uneasily exposed the door opens again. This time it’s Persephone’s turn to do a double take, which doesn’t give me any kind of happy fun feeling. Persephone Hazard likes to dress like a mafia heiress from Marseilles, living la dolce vita with a Beretta in her handbag—which just goes to show that appearances are deceptive: she’s the most powerful witch in London. (Also, I happen to know that she carries an FN Five-seveN with an AAC sound suppressor and a 20-round magazine full of microengraved banishment rounds. Berettas are for amateurs.) She nods in my direction, then engages Dr. Armstrong directly. “Did you see the news this morning?”
The SA smiles his saintly smile—the one he rolls out just before he brains you with a sledgehammer—and says, “I must confess I never turn on the television before the sun’s over the yardarm.”
“It wasn’t me!” I protest, before I realize that given a twenty-four-hour news cycle it might very well have been me.
But I’m in luck. “No, it wasn’t,”’Seph agrees. “Your performance on Newsnight would have been a vast improvement over this morning’s headlines.” Her fine nostrils flare. “What is the world coming to?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Dr. Armstrong says placidly. “Help yourself to tea and biscuits, dear. We may be some time.”
I force myself to sit down. ’Seph is really rattled, but it’s not my fault. She’s one of our heavy hitters, a deniable external asset who generally tackles the kind of assignment that on old reruns of Mission: Impossible is tagged with “the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.”
* * *
“I thought this was the postmortem for the media outreach event,” I say as the door opens again and Vik Choudhury slides in. “That’s what’s down in my calendar.”
’Seph rolls her eyes as Dr. Armstrong shakes his head, more in sorrow than in anger. “Oh dear, no! I’m afraid we’ve been pre-empted by events.”
That does not sound good. “Was it something I did?”
“Your drop went just fine,” Vikram assures me. To ’Seph, and the other attendees: “Mhari delivered her payload to the edit suite and Bob successfully bugged the underside of the studio’s number two visitor chair. And now we’ve got six SPIN DIAMOND grids transmitting from the newsroom, thanks to your masterful distraction.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t just substitute the contract cleaners—”
“It’s a newsroom, Bob,” Persephone sniffs. “They weren’t born yesterday. Security vetting the cleaners goes with the territory.”
“Well. I hope it was worth it. That kind of op usually ends in tears, in my experience—too much chance of blowback—”
“Too late to worry about spilt milk, Mr. Howard.” Dr. Armstrong stares at the ceiling, steepling his fingertips. “This meeting is starting late,” he adds, “so we are not yet on the official record. But can I request a change of subject?”
Gulp. Even ’Seph has the decency to look bashful. “Sure,” I say.
The door opens again, this time to admit a stranger. “Bob, this is Chris Womack from Administration and Policy.” She’s a tall woman, midfifties at a guess, a no-nonsense senior civil service type. I stand, and we shake hands. “Chris, Bob is Dr. Angleton’s replacement. You can trust him implicitly, subject to keyword clearance.” Which tells me in turn that the Senior Auditor trusts her implicitly.
“I saw you on Newsnight last night,” she says, smiling guardedly, which makes me feel so much better.
“What can I say?” I shrug. “Opportunities to make a fool of myself in front of such a large audience only come along once in a lifetime.”
“Bob enjoys playing the departmental jester,” says Persephone. She smiles. “Don’t worry, Bob, you get to do this again.” Ouch.
“Absolutely.” Ms. Womack’s smile widens. “You did quite well,” she adds, “for a first-timer. Let me know if you ever feel the urge to go into public relations full-time.”
“I’ll be sure to do that.” Shortly after a squadron of pigs are observed taking off from Heathrow Airport.
The door opens again and this time my brain freezes as eyes meet across a crowded conference room. The late arrival also freezes as the SA smoothly takes over: “Chris, this is Dr. O’Brien, Dominique, this is Chris Womack, our Chief Counsel. Mo is the newest member of the Audit Committee—” My wife raises an eyebrow at me and I nod, then pull the seat beside me back from the table to make room for her. My pulse is running too fast. Mhari was right, I realize. But there’s too much to say, it’s forming a pileup behind my tongue, and anyway Dr. Armstrong is still speaking. “—time to call this meeting to order now we’re all here—”
She sits down next to me and leans sideways to whisper in my ear. “Your office, after we’re finished here?”
I nod. The SA is continuing: “Crisis containment and management in the wake of this month’s events have broken down. The usual mass observation protocol simply doesn’t work for an incursion on this scale. Also, the activation of PLAN RED RABBIT and the subsequent need to brief the Cabinet Office emergency committee and bring the full civil contingencies apparatus up to speed means that awareness of the agency’s existence is now widespread.” That’s an understatement and a half: the crisis hasn’t been out of the headlines for weeks. “Pointed questions are being raised in the House of Commons, there have been ministerial resignations and a vote of confidence that narrowly failed to bring down the government, another reshuffle is planned, and it doesn’t stop there. Maneuvering by various factions in the cabinet suggests that a leadership coup within the leading party in the coalition is likely if the Prime Minister isn’t seen to clean house rapidly. Chris is here to brief us on the past week’s political developments, our position in terms to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act—which is anomalous—and the likely implications for the organization.”
The Delirium Brief Page 3