A contact with a prearranged code that gets the SA’s attention can’t be anything trivial. I tense. “I can do that, but you’ll need to give me something more. Otherwise I won’t know when to pay attention.”
The SA nods, shadowing his eye sockets. “His name is Bill McKracken and he’s a US Postal Service inspector. He flew in from New York on a red-eye this morning and he’s due to fly out from Heathrow late this evening.” I wince. (I’ve done the London/New York day trip myself; in economy class the jet lag is brutal.) “He just felt like a chat, for old time’s sake.” Dr. Armstrong’s smile is terrifying.
“You said he’s a postal inspector. You mean the, uh, he’s one of the Comstock people?”
“The Comstock people don’t exist, Bob.” He doesn’t meet my eyes. “He’s just a postal inspector.” He slides a folded sheet of paper onto my desk, covered in his cramped, neat handwriting. “There you go. I’ll take your report later tonight or first thing in the morning. Ta-ta.”
The SA unfolds from his chair like an origami giraffe, waits for me to switch off the DO NOT DISTURB sign, then leaves without a backwards glance. And that’s when I realize that things are even worse than I imagined. Because the “Comstock people” don’t officially exist, and if they’re jetting in from New York to ask for our assistance things must be really bad.
* * *
Long ago, in the late nineteenth century, there lived a certain American Postal Service inspector named Anthony Comstock. While serving in the Union army during the US Civil War, Comstock was shocked—shocked!—to discover the profanity and ungodly behavior of his fellow soldiers. He responded like any other self-righteous, bluenosed killjoy by creating the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which did exactly what you’d expect it to: lobby for a law to criminalize the transport by mail of “lewd materials” including anything to do with sex education, abortion, contraceptives, or the prevention of sexually transmissible diseases. And, having gotten his law passed by Congress, Comstock was given a commission by the Inspector General of the Postal Service to enforce it, which he did with enthusiasm, acquiring for himself and his inspectors the status of federal agents with the right to open the mail.
While the original Comstock Law was overturned some time in the 1950s, the US Postal Service Inspectorate still exists to this day. It’s a small federal agency with obscure but remarkably far-reaching powers, who mostly keep an eye out for people stealing from the mail or using it to transport narcotics, child pornography, and other contraband. And one particular task that Comstock took on is still an active part of their remit—although not many people know that the Occult Texts Division goes back that far.
Now, here’s a very weird thing: the defense establishment of the United States of America is so complicated, not to say baroque, that many different agencies can accomplish any given task. Want to invade a small Caribbean island? Who you gonna call: the Army or the Navy’s Army, which is to say, the Marine Corps? Want to call in an air strike? You could ask the Air Force … but the US Navy has lots and lots of fighter jets and tends to get annoyed if they’re left out. And the Army of the Navy has its own Air Force, the USMC Air Corps, and they’ve got aircraft carriers. It’s the same, if not worse, in the world of covert operations and intelligence. Nobody is quite sure how many espionage and counterespionage agencies the US government runs, but there are at least nineteen and, by some accounts, more than thirty.
And then we get into the superblack world of occult intelligence agencies like the Laundry.
Generally, when we deal with the US government, we find ourselves dealing with the Operational Phenomenology Agency, also known as the Black Chamber—the original 1920s organization, of which the NSA is a spin-off—and known to their detractors as the Nazgûl. The OPA are not nice people. In fact, mostly they’re not people at all, except in the loosest sense of the word. OPA doctrine calls for the binding and control of “occult intelligence assets,” demons by any other name, and their deployment as agents of the state, loyalty guaranteed by the choke chain of a fate worse than death should they ever fall short of instant unthinking obedience to their handlers.
The OPA are not the only American OCCINT agency. Comstock’s office began finding copies of the Necronomicon in the mail during the 1880s. With the growing popularity of theosophy and Eastern traditions in the late nineteenth century, the Occult Texts Division took a proprietorial interest in the spread of esoteric materials, seeking to track and prosecute the exiled spawn of Innsmouth, the masked followers of the Liber Facierum, the True Initiates and Hidden Seekers of the hairy stars and the final conjunction of the heavens. They don’t discuss their successes, but some say that they were instrumental in preventing the serial killer H. H. Holmes from completing his necromantic murder palace in Chicago. Their fingerprints have been found on correspondence relating to the cases of Albert Fish and the Manson Family. If the OPA are a ghastly hybrid of all the worst elements of the CIA and the NSA, with a strong stench of demonology on top, then the OTD is the counter-OCCINT air freshener in the room. But a bathroom air freshener can only do so much to stave off the stink of a pile of rotting corpses, and the OTD is so small and beleaguered that many people doubt they even exist any more.
* * *
I stumble bleary-eyed onto the pavement outside the New Annex just before seven, late enough that even the police on the door have gone home. I have my messenger bag slung over one shoulder; the suit carrier I left to fend for itself in my office. I hang a left along the high street, catch a bus most of the way back to my hotel, then detour into the hole-in-the-wall pub where, per the SA’s instructions, I can expect to find my contact from the US Postal Service Inspectorate’s Occult Texts Division.
It’s becoming extremely hard to find a good pub in London these days. Partly it’s the housing market: real estate speculators love to buy up the title deeds to a pub and redevelop the land it sits on as something more profitable. And partly it’s the knock-on effect of smoking bans and drunk-driving laws. Pubs have to make their money somehow, so they can either go gastro and turn into a boutique restaurant dining experience, or go swill-house and pack in the inebriate herd. The upshot is that you can’t find a decent, quiet hole-in-the-wall where you can have a low-key conversation: either they’re trying to upsell you a fifty-quid-a-head artisanal pork pie (serving this week: Peppa Pig’s Uncle Bertie’s left haunch, marinaded in a drizzle of preschoolers’ tears) or it’s so packed you need an oxygen mask to breathe and are reduced to texting your neighbor by way of conversation.
The SA’s note directs me to one of the former. The bar is pointedly stool-less and the tables all boast clipboards with multipage menus changing by the hour, and the kind of incredibly hard seating that causes your legs to go to sleep within half an hour if you’re there for a leisurely drink rather than to gobble and go. The tables are, predictably, crammed, but the bar isn’t too bad, and there’s a guy standing there who fits the description. He’s wearing an airline-rumpled nondescript suit that shouts Fed in an American accent, with buzz-cut hair, six o’clock stubble, and a despondent expression. A fiftyish face that’s been lived in for too long, like a once-handsome shopping mall on the downslope to demolition. He’s swaying gently over his pint of London Pride but it’s not drunk swaying, it’s I-can’t-stay-awake wobbling. Every minute he gives a little myoclonic jolt and stretches his back, as if forcing himself not to fall asleep. Poor bastard probably shipped over in cattle class and has been awake for going on forty-eight hours. Oh, and the cheap briefcase at his feet is wearing a level six ward, which seals the deal.
I wander up beside him and wave a purple drinking voucher at the manager. “Pint of Spitfire,” I say, then turn to see my barside companion’s eyelids fluttering. “You must be Bill. Dr. Armstrong sent me.”
My contact twitches wildly, nearly knocking his half-full glass over, then glares at me. “Who?” he demands.
“Are you Bill McKracken?” I ask, flipping open my wallet so h
e can see the warrant card.
“I”—I can see his brain strip a cog as he hesitates on the edge of a stutter—“yeah, I am.” His watery blue eyes focus on the card and flicker alert. “Mr. Howard. Huh. I’ve heard of you.” He glances at my face, his expression shuttered. “Who did you say sent you?”
I slide the wallet away as the bar manager shoves a pint of Spitfire in front of me and makes my twenty vanish. “Dr. Armstrong, our Senior Auditor. He sends his regrets but he’s tied up in a meeting this evening. I’m here in his place.” I raise my pint to him. “To see you don’t miss your flight home. Cheers.”
A certain tension drains away from his shoulders. “I was getting worried. Hell of a way to come for a no-show.”
“We’ve been a bit busy this week.” He nods vigorously. All his body language is a bit off, with the kind of uncoordinated exaggeration of someone who’s losing fine motor control from being awake too long. “What brings you over here?” I ask, checking the time. If we’re to get him to Heathrow for a nine o’clock check-in we’ll have to leave soon.
“My manager sent me to courier a message for your C-suite crisis team. Hand-to-hand, eyes-only, because the regular networks are all compromised. I’m supposed to deliver it in person, so”—McKracken looks at me—“I apologize in advance,” he says, then hits me in the face with a soul-gaze.
It is a very bad idea to try and soul-gaze the Eater of Souls. I manage to catch him under the arm before he crumples, and save his pint from spilling for the second time in a minute, and I’m pretty certain I managed not to take a bite out of him but dammit, it’s a really bad idea to take me by surprise that way. Clearly an adept, he takes it on the figurative chin and bends over, retching. I wave the bartender back: “I think he just tried to inhale his beer,” I tell the guy. McKracken leans against the bar and takes a deep breath, eyes squeezed shut. He’s actually in good shape, considering what he just tried to do. If an unwarded civilian caught me by surprise like that they’d be waiting for an ambulance right now.
“What are you?” he manages.
I shrug. “Bob Howard, Detached Senior Specialist grade one, Q-Division SOE, at your service. Like I said, the Senior Auditor was unavailable so they sent me in his place.”
“But you’re not, you’re not—” He looks at my face, everywhere but my eyes, as if frantically searching for something he’s lost.
“I’m Dr. Angleton’s replacement,” I say gently, and his face pales.
“I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”
“No,” I agree with him, “you shouldn’t. But you’ve got my undivided attention. Now. What can I do for the Comstock division?”
McKracken clears his throat discreetly, glances round, then makes a curious hand gesture: obviously triggering a macro of some sort, for the noise of the pub flattens and fuzzes until I can no longer identify individual voices. “The short version is, we’re fucked.” He raises his briefcase to the bar, dials in a combination, mutters something under his breath—I feel the very nasty wards on the case relax—and opens it. The contents are disappointingly mundane: toilet kit, spare socks, boarding pass and passport, a battered Dell laptop covered in inventory control stickers, and a brown manila document mailer. This he passes to me. From the heft, it contains some sort of file. “This is the long version. Codename DELIRIUM. Everything about how the enemy within sneaked up on us and whacked us and what they’re trying to accomplish, not that we can do anything about it—it’s gone too far.”
I accept the envelope and slide it into my messenger bag. He glances at it dubiously for a second, then nods. “This will be in front of our executive within twelve hours,” I promise him. “Now. What’s gone too far?” I pick up my glass, take a mouthful of beer, and wait.
McKracken closes his case and pulls himself together with a visible effort. “We’re being attacked via a new vulnerability channel: privatization.” His shoulders slump. “For the past few decades a bunch of congressmen have been pushing a bill to privatize the USPS.” He means their post office. “It’s going to happen sooner rather than later.” I manage to keep a straight face. (It may have been driven off the front page by events in Leeds, but there’s currently a scandal brewing in the news about how little money the government made from selling off the Royal Mail last year.) “When that happens, the Inspectorate’s duties go with it and will be fully under the authority of the new owners. The private carriers, UPS, FedEx, and their rivals, are covered by Homeland Security. So it’s a way of selling us out.”
“If it happens.” I try to look on the bright side.
“No, it’s gonna happen. The fix is in. The Inspectorate has been disbanded and defunded, via an amendment to a fisheries bill that Congress passed on the nod. They blindsided us with this—we had less than a week’s advance warning, it just came out of nowhere, bam! Only it’s not a true privatization—the Treasury will keep a controlling shareholding and most of the shares go to a holding company that already exists, a front owned by the OPA that’s called GP Services. That’s short for Golden Promise.”
I nearly drop my glass. “The—what—”
I have a flashback to fimbulwinter striking Colorado Springs, years ago: driving through a blizzard towards the airport only to be turned back by Highway Patrol officers. Johnny McTavish and ’Seph Hazard in a safe house, looking angry and tired and alive in a way they never were in meetings, like they’d woken up and remembered what it was like to measure themselves against dead-eyed worshippers chanting foul hymns in a desecrated megachurch before a silver-haired preacher with flickering emerald-bright eyes. Me, and a giant wood louse from hell in a fish tank in the basement of a church, mindlessly singing lullabies to its worshippers through the spawn it had grafted to them in place of their tongues.
“GP Services is a subsidiary of GP Systems, which is owned by Golden Promise Ministries out of Colorado Springs, which was set up over a decade ago by one of the OPA’s deniable assets, a stringer called Schiller.” I startle involuntarily. “Did you know of him?”
“We met,” I say before I can bite my tongue, and McKracken’s eyebrows rise.
“Welp, that’ll make this easier. He disappeared a while ago, but his corporation is still rolling and they’re taking point for a series of operations the Nazgûl appear to be running, and apparently the Nazgûl are willing to burn about three billion bucks just to shut down the US Postal Service Inspectorate’s Occult Texts Division.” He taps his briefcase. “As to why they’re making a play so big right now … it’s part of a grand strategy. The Black Chamber’s true master is finally stepping out of the shadows and moving to consolidate power. And you need to tell your bosses that my agency is burned. Steps are being taken to ensure that the Black Library doesn’t fall into their hands, and a bunch of us are taking retirement, all kinda ensuring that continuity of institutional experience is lost, if you follow my drift. At this point that’s all we can do, unless you know a way to unroot a congressman who’s been got to by the Nazgûl…? No? Didn’t think so. Anyway, we can’t fight back actively, but that envelope contains a synopsis of everything we know about how they made their play, everything about the relationship between GP Services and the Operational Phenomenology Agency that we’ve been able to dig up, and how they’re trying to take over the governments. Ours first, then yours. It’s our worst-case scenario. The monsters have taken over the Black Chamber, and their dread master is using a fake outsourcing bid as a lever to liquidate the opposition agency and pave the way for his return as we approach the Grand Conjunction.”
“Are you—” I swallow. Unaccountably, my throat is dry: I chug my beer. “—are you going to be all right? Do you want to talk to someone about asylum?” Although fuck knows how much standing we’ve got on that subject since Alex pulled that stunt with the Host …
McKracken snorts. “I’ve got my pension; Friday is officially my last day on the job. Figure I’ll move out somewhere cheaper to live, catch up on all the fishing I haven’t had time
for. Montana maybe. Somewhere where”—his voice drops to a confidential murmur—“there’s a survivalist community who have an inkling about what’s coming, if you know what I mean.”
* * *
We finish our drinks and I escort Bill to Paddington—which is well out of my way home to my digs—and see him onto the Heathrow Express. Back to the gathering storm on the East Coast. I wish him luck, but if half of what he said is true, then he might have been wiser to ask for asylum.
The idea that the Black Chamber is willing to spend billions to take out a minor and eccentric rival agency leaves me shaken. That they’re using Raymond Schiller’s outfit as a front to do so is even worse. Schiller’s dead, but the thought of the thing he served gives me the cold shudders. The idea that the Nazgûl are working with the Sleeper cultists in service to a greater evil … well fuck me, and here I was hoping to catch some sleep tonight. Instead, it looks like I’m heading back to the office to type up an urgent report about the end of the world. Again.
The pavement is nearly deserted and the traffic has thinned out from the usual rush hour rumble and daytime congestion. It’s getting into summer so the London air is the usual oppressive mixture of humidity, dust, diesel fumes, and the collective body odor of ten million people crammed in a city that hasn’t discovered air-conditioning. Or maybe that’s just me, impatient and looking forward to a hotel shower. But in any case, I’m shaken and worried and not paying nearly enough attention to the overfamiliar streets around the New Annex.
Which is why it takes me way too long to realize I’m being followed.
I am enough of a native to catch the bus where possible, to avoid the stifling summer congestion of the Tube (no air-conditioning and worse crowding than the Tokyo subway) and the wallet-bleeding cost of taxis (which seem to burn pure single malt Scotch, judging by what they charge). The nearest stop is a quarter mile from the New Annex, so I get off along with a couple of other passengers and walk briskly towards the corner of the high street. It’s late enough that the pavement is nearly deserted. My thoughts are with the suitcase in the left-luggage lockup at last night’s hotel. I’m not sure what I was hoping for: another short-notice assignment out of country, perhaps, or maybe an overnight invitation from Mo. Either way it was a wash, so I might as well sleep under my desk tonight, grab the bags tomorrow, hit Expedia for a last-minute hotel bargain, and check myself in somewhere for a couple of nights—
The Delirium Brief Page 6