“No, that won’t be necessary,” Schiller says flatly. “Just keep out of sight and log all his contacts. Only exception is if a name on the OPA’s Termination Expedient list comes up. If that happens”—Schiller shrugs—“I wash my hands of them.”
“Understood, boss.” Garry makes a note on his BlackBerry. “Will that be all?”
Schiller’s smile is thin as a paper-cut. “Howard and his fellows will get their just reward in heaven; with our Lord’s strength and the cooperation of our fellow Americans we will prevail.” For a moment his eyes flash emerald with a glowing, unhuman fervor. “Victory is near; let’s not mess it up this time.”
* * *
As it turns out, Mo and I do not get a chance to put our heads together in my office right after Ms. Womack drops the bomb, because we both get dragged off to different crisis meetings. In my case it’s a session with Vik and ’Seph to discuss how we’re going to cover the long-term absence of several senior personnel from External Assets and Active Ops (let’s not use phrases like “suspended on full pay pending a public enquiry, possible criminal charges to follow”). We also discuss how best to shelter certain lower-level personnel who may have inadvertently come to the attention of Very Important People—we don’t want them to be called to account for stuff they’re not responsible for.
Consider the salutary example of Dr. Alex Schwartz, former pencil-necked geek, now vampire. I will freely admit that I don’t like the little toe-rag—the first time we met he nearly punched me through an office wall, and he’s a bloodsucking fiend—but some of the more excitable tabloid columnists are calling for him to be tried for treason, which is a bit rich for my taste. Even if sanity prevails he can expect a long and promising career as a political punch-bag and an object lesson in why we do not allow junior officers to negotiate peace treaties with hostile alien empires. But hanging him out to dry won’t save us from a witch hunt, won’t set any kind of good example for the rest of us, and will deprive the organization of a little toe-rag who made the best of a really bad job and shows considerable promise for the future. And so on.
I stumble out of the meeting room with a list of bullet points echoing around the inside of my skull, the beginnings of a really special headache, and a rumbling stomach. As soon as I get past the Faraday-shielded wallpaper and into the corridor my phone vibrates. It’s a text from Mo. She’s running late too, and suggests catching up in the canteen. I groan.
Actually, I groan prematurely. When I get there I discover that it has been upgraded since the last time I was in town, in a desperate attempt to staunch the lunchtime exodus and thereby make life easier for the guards on the front door. They’ve repainted the walls, replaced the chairs and tables with ones that date to the current century, laid carpet (Facilities are clearly living dangerously), and as for the menu … oh my goodness, it’s come over all gastropub. Of course you still can’t have a beer or a glass of wine with your lunch, but the food itself is subsidized and the portions are plentiful. Being under siege by eldritch horrors clearly has a silver lining, so I go and fetch myself a latte and something that claims to be bruschetta with a topping of mozzarella and rosemary, then go find a corner to lurk in.
Ten minutes later I’m doing my daily updates to my Twitter feed—we’re required to maintain a boringly vague social media presence these days, just so we don’t stand out like a sore thumb when foreign agencies sweep the net in search of spies—when Mo approaches. She puts her tray down and pulls out her chair as I try and think of something to say. “Well?” she asks, unwrapping the paper serviette from around her cutlery.
I shrug and bite off a mouthful of flatbread and smashed tomatoes in olive oil while I put my brain in gear. It buys me a couple of seconds. “I gather congratulations are in order,” I try.
A frown flickers across her face, just a microexpression but enough to make me wince. “Not you, too?”
I mime thumping the side of my head. “A knight’s move up the org chart is usually considered grounds for congratulation, but given the square you’ve landed on, I can see why you might be conflicted about it.” It’s not much of an apology but she nods warily, then takes a sip of her mineral water, and pokes at her chicken Caesar salad, checking it for threats. I try not to twitch. She may be back from medical leave but she’s still broadcasting WHOOP WHOOP RED ALERT stress signals on all the emergency frequencies I can pick up. “Bad meeting?”
She nods and swallows convulsively, leaving her fork hanging in front of her mouth. “You could say that.” She pauses a moment, makes the food disappear—a very good sign—then continues: “Dealing with a lot of follow-up and loose ends left over from Operation INCORRIGIBLE, to say nothing of Leeds.” She dry-swallows, then reaches for her mineral water. “I’m not looking forward to that,” she adds; “my first time on an Audit Committee and it has to be that one.”
Oh yes, that would explain her mood. The Auditors will be all over the mess in Leeds. Power to bind and release, enforcement of oath of office, that sort of thing. Authority to lay charges before the Black Assizes, our very own Star Chamber, potentially unlimited penalties: sobering stuff to say the least. Never mind the House of Commons Select Committee on Intelligence. “There’s a difference between intentional malfeasance and failure to recognize and respond to an unprecedented threat optimally,” I remind her. One’s a soul-stripping offense, at least potentially; the other is just grounds for additional training and supervision. “This isn’t an Iris Carpenter scenario.”
I was trying to reassure her but I’ve obviously said something wrong because Mo jolts as if I just kicked her under the table and glares, eyes narrowed. “What did you just say?”
“Uh?” I boggle. Iris was my manager from hell a few years ago: very good at her job, except she’d somehow fooled her oath of office (the geas by which all Laundry staff are bound) into letting her lead a congregation of the Church of the Black Pharaoh. I rub my upper right arm self-consciously; it still aches occasionally where her hellspawn offspring took a chunk out of me and ate it, consuming Bob sashimi as a kind of unholy communion. (I survived: that’s enough.) “I’m just saying, this isn’t an Iris situation: we have met the enemy and it ain’t us. There is no treason here, the SA is breaking you in gently.” Iris disappeared into one of the organization’s deeper oubliettes shortly after her abortive summoning turned the UK’s largest graveyard into a zombie rave. I haven’t heard anything about her since I got pulled off the COBWEB MAZE committee, so I suppose she’s still in prison. I’m not generally vindictive or vengeful, but if she’s on the outside she’d better hope she never bumps into me, is all.
(I haven’t forgiven her for the thing with the baby and the sacrificial altar.)
Mo uncoils slightly. “Well,” she says, “that’s all I can say for now.” Her eyes swivel sidelong. “This is no place to talk shop.” Even though it’s a canteen in a regional headquarters building of a top secret agency, loose lips are discouraged outside meeting rooms or warded offices. “Especially about this morning’s stink bomb.”
Uh-oh: I see where this conversation is going. “Well, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking,” I admit, then pause to polish off my bruschetta.
“Thinking is dangerous, Bob.” There’s a drip of my wife’s old, dry affection there, under all the stress-bunny anxiety and borderline PTSD.
“Do you want to make another go of it?” It slips out without my thinking it consciously, and I freeze, watching her freeze as she watches me right back. Her expression is haunted. (I think that’s the right word for it.)
“We can’t go back to the way we were,” she says, but there’s uncertainty and regret there, so I push, hoping I’m not trying too hard—
“What about the spare room? We could clear it out and put a really heavy-duty ward on it—” The spare room in our house is a joke. Officially it’s a bedroom, but this being London, that needs clarifying as “bedroom two, suitable for small child or gerbil.”
Mo’s lips thin. “I
t’s too small, unless we throw out a bunch of junk, and even then … not viable, love. Anyway, it’s not safe for you to move back in: what if you sleepwalk while I’m going to the bathroom in the night?”
“But you’re an Auditor, dammit! That’s hardly defenseless, I should be afraid of you—”
I manage to stop myself before I can say anything inexcusable.
Mo shakes her head. Around the canteen I see people pointedly ignoring the married couple raising their voices in the corner. It’s as if we’ve got our very own invisibility field. “No, Bob,” she says tiredly, “mutually assured destruction is not a reasonable basis for a marriage. Sooner or later one of us will get overstressed, there’ll be an argument, and it’ll be the kind of domestic that starts with thrown crockery and levels up to grenade launchers. Only we don’t max out at ‘high explosives, handle with care’ anymore. This isn’t Mr. & Mrs. Smith. We’ve got to find a better way.”
“Do you have any ideas?” I ask.
She gives me a guarded look that screams nothing up my sleeve, nothing to see here, then goes back to digging in her salad. I watch her in frustration. Presently she says, “On the subject of your being the Eater of Souls, I want to do some digging in the archives, follow up a couple of loose ends. There’s nothing else exactly like it but maybe TEAPOT…” She trails off into thoughtful silence, then pauses. “In the meantime, we could try counseling? See if that shakes something loose.”
“Counseling.” I know the word but I don’t know what it means, at least not at a gut level. “Um. What? I mean, why? It’s not like”—I swallow—“I still love you.”
“Yes, I know.” She puts her fork down and reaches across the table for my hand. I have an unaccountable feeling that I somehow said the wrong thing, although I’m not sure how. “But that’s not why marriages end, is it? At least, not always. A lot of the time it’s because one or both partners have gotten into ways of behaving that the other can’t live with, or because one or both are going through a period of personal growth and the other isn’t keeping up or isn’t on the same track, or because they’re both stressed out. And that last one applies to us like nothing else. We’ve hit an impasse. It’s not even about us both sleeping with a loaded gun under the pillow. Metaphorical loaded gun … It’s the responsibility, Bob. We need to talk about me being an Auditor and you being what you are and it just isn’t happening and the longer we leave it the worse the pressure will get, and even if we find a way to live together we’ll end up squabbling because of the stress.”
I don’t understand exactly what she thinks we need to talk about, but maybe that’s half the problem. So I nod and try to look as if I understand, because listening is half of the solution. “Going to need a security-cleared counselor.”
She raises a warning finger. “Not Pete.”
“Friends don’t make friends debug their marriage?”
“Correct—not if they want to stay friends, anyway. And we don’t have enough of them.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath and suddenly I wonder just how much this conversation has taken out of her. Has she been lying awake at nights, rehearsing its script endlessly, the way I have? “I’m glad you’re taking this so well.”
“Hey”—I reach for a lighthearted quip but the quiver is empty—“I’m glad you still want to try.”
“Let me see if I can find a suitable counselor first, then thank me.” She pushes her tray back, only half-eaten, and gives me a tired smile. “I don’t want to go on this way.”
“Neither do I.” I stand up. “So let’s not.”
* * *
One of the problems associated with inheriting a new and senior position by virtue of the law of necromantic succession—that is, dead man’s shoes—is that I am now expected to work at executive level. In a regular government agency I’d be in a Senior Civil Service grade, and if this was a private sector organization I’d be a vice president. If you’re the janitor and the stores cupboard is bare, you shrug and blame your manager; if you’re the VP in charge of Facilities and the stores cupboard is bare, you are responsible and you just fucked up by failing to organize resupply. I actually have—this is quite terrifying—signing authority and a budget line all of my very own. It’s terrifying because I can use it whenever I feel like it, except that I’ve got to keep Accounts in the loop, on pain of being taken aside for a quiet word by the SA himself if I screw up. On the other hand, being able to sign a hotel bill on my own cognizance after a hard day’s work stabbing chupacabras in Belize is like a breath of fresh air-conditioning.
When I’m not conducting goat-sucker population control exercises, part of my new job is to digest a book of accounting rules several centimeters thick. (This is the abbreviated training-wheels version, you understand, for the very junior Vice President in Charge of Janitorial Supplies.) Another part of my job involves spending two-hour sessions holed up in an office with the long-suffering Emma MacDougal from HR. Emma is tutoring me on how management works: not the MBA everything-is-a-process employees-are-perfectly-spherical-interchangeable-blobs variety that all the smiling sociopaths in suits are getting in the private sector, but how this very eccentric job-for-life corner of the Civil Service works internally, with a specific emphasis on house-training the newly minted sorcerer. Apparently I wasn’t expected to hit this grade for another five years, but CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and vacant org chart boxes are calling, so needs must.
It’s not my favorite part of the job, but I can’t see a way around it. If my office needs redecorating I can’t moan at my boss anymore, I am the boss. So I need to know how to fill out the right magic scrolls to summon Facilities, recite the correct incantation to invoke Painters and Decorators, and propitiate the demons of Accounts by documenting peeling wallpaper and rising damp. Which is to say, I’m learning a whole lot about how this organization works, in ways I’d barely even noticed before.
It’s quite humbling, really. I was intimately familiar with the endless upgrades to the structured cabling runs that keep our in-house networks running, but I had little or no idea about how my proposals for work got turned into the budget items, job specifications, and contract tenders that resulted in people in overalls coming in to lift floor tiles and install runs of Cat5e cabling. Bureaucracy is like an iceberg: nine-tenths of it is below the waterline, and if you spend all your time rubbernecking at the tentacle monsters while you let the ship of state drift, before you know it the canteen will be out of tea bags and the engine room crew will go on work-to-rule.
This is a long and rambling way of explaining why I don’t get to leave the office until well after 6:00 p.m.
I spend the first half of the afternoon with Emma chewing over the high-level org chart and procedures for submitting job requests to IT Services from outside (the irony is not lost on me), and then I spend a couple of hours with Boris and Vik analyzing the reception my appearance on Newsnight got. We have had a dozen or so write-ups in newspapers (nothing making the front page), a minor “boffin puts foot in mouth at new agency” tag on The Register, which got picked up by BuzzFeed for some reason, and three requests for interviews from local radio stations, all of which were politely turned down on my behalf before they reached my inbox. The request from the Today program on Radio 4 is a lot harder to ignore, but I gather policy (per the SA and the shadowy coterie of senior administrators who rule on such things) is to (a) play for time, and (b) spread the misery around, so they’re going to try and break out of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, then send Mhari round to flash her choppers at them. She can’t plead incendiary tendencies under arc lights to dodge a radio interview, can she? Hah.
I get everything nailed down by five o’clock, but then realize I’ve barely had time to check my email all day, so I head back to my office. And that’s when I find I have a visitor.
“Ah, Bob, do come in.” It’s the SA, sitting primly in my visitor’s chair. “Are you terribly busy right now?”
Cold sweat breaks out up and down my spine. “No, no
t really—” Oh god what have I done—
Dr. Armstrong looks thoughtful. “I have a little errand for you.” A momentary pause. “You are not in trouble,” he adds.
“Uh—” I manage not to startle. “Oh. An errand.” I walk to my desk, stiff-legged with relief, and sit down, then hit the DO NOT DISTURB light switch. “Do tell.” Bastard, thanks for taking a year off my life like that. It’s unfair of me to blame Dr. Armstrong for my own guilty conscience, even when I know I haven’t done anything, but he’s the Senior Auditor: he doesn’t pay house calls, as a rule.
“I have a little out-of-the-office errand I was going to attend to this evening but I’ve been delayed and I was wondering if you could take care of it for me? It’s just a short diversion on your way home.”
“I suppose so.” By home, I hope he means the hotel, otherwise it’s in the opposite direction from where I’m going. “What is it?”
He leans towards me, intent. “This is not to be discussed outside your office or mine, and your report will be classified Secret and prepared under NOELEC protocol.” I have to write my report using a manual typewriter or a pen, in other words, on handmade paper inside a warded containment grid. I’d be seriously annoyed if this didn’t flag the SA’s “little errand” as highly sensitive. “Understood?”
I nod. “What’s up?”
Dr. Armstrong glances sidelong at the door. “I received a signal from an old acquaintance this afternoon,” he says, “using a prearranged code. He’s in London and he wants to talk to someone. I”—for a moment an expression of savage frustration flickers across his face—“I’m tied up with setup for TITANIC for the foreseeable future. Burning the midnight oil. It couldn’t come at a worse time, in fact it’s probably connected, but I need someone reliable—you—to go and listen to the man, hear what he has to say, and report back to me.”
The Delirium Brief Page 5