The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  Raymond Schiller has acquired the exclusive use of the facilities at Nether Stowe House for a one-month period with a down payment of two million pounds. It’s cheap at the cost but there will be other ongoing expenses: the executive helicopter service, the catering and drinks bill, the ongoing cost of security clearing the hospitality workers bussed in from nearby Amersham, the security itself—provided by Schiller’s corporation—and sundry others. For the season of entertaining he has planned, it will be necessary to upgrade the house security system, install a picocell and leased line to secure the visitors’ mobile phone traffic, and place discreet cameras in all the public and private rooms. It is also necessary to hire certain other workers, who will arrive and depart discreetly and service those guests who Anneka and his staff deem more likely to respond to sex and drugs than wine and money.

  (While Raymond respects those who follow the teachings of the Lord and his various prophets and apostles, he is a pragmatist and understands that he cannot afford to scorn the willing aid of powerful men who are less scrupulous about the state of their souls. And so his staff are under orders to ensure the purity of the cocaine and the STD-free status of the sex workers no less than the quality of the champagne and caviar.)

  Finally, certain other preparations demand Schiller’s personal attention and the participation of his permanent staff, handmaids, and deacons—all fully inducted members of the Inner Temple. In London, if you have enough money you can obtain the services of almost any imaginable consultant; Schiller’s virtuous servants require additional coaching and training, a task that is outsourced to a former high-class madam. With the correct costumes and accessories they will be able to pass, and they are all of one mind in their determination to perform the necessary but somewhat distasteful actions to the best of their abilities: for they know their souls are safe in the Lord’s hands, and it is their duty to spread the Lord’s seed far and wide, and harvest new souls for the Inner Temple.

  * * *

  Two women sit beside a table in a wooden hut, drinking tea and trying to work out where it all went wrong.

  “It’s been, what, six years? Six and a half?”

  “You get used to it eventually. I’ll confess the lack of visitors is troubling—you get bitter after a while, thinking you’ve been forgotten. But it’s also peaceful, and eventually you get used to it.” She chuckles, slightly sadly. “In the Middle Ages they used to warehouse the surplus women—at least the better class of women, along with the hard-to-control ones—in nunneries. I’m not under a vow of poverty or chastity or anything like that, and I’m certainly not allowed to pray—but? There’s plenty of time for meditation and cloud watching. And it’s peaceful.”

  “Peaceful.” An edge of scorn creeps into Persephone’s voice. “And I suppose you prefer it like that.”

  “Does it make any difference? We’re all doomed, either way. Would you like a top-up?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Persephone waits and watches while the woman she’s come to visit performs the ritual of refilling the teacups. (She was present when the tea was brewed and the milk carton unsealed; her trust is not unconditional.) Her—host is not precisely the right word; disgraced former coworker might be closer—moves with slow deliberation. There’s no need for haste in her condition, in this place. She’s got all the time in the world. Detained Indefinitely at Her Majesty’s Pleasure is the technical term for her situation, a life sentence pursuant to a criminal trial and verdict handed down by the Black Assizes. Peering at the backs of her hands, Persephone spies the telltale signs of aging. The loosening of the skin, tendons and veins rising into view as subcutaneous fat recedes. Her grip is firm, though, the stream of tea pouring steadily into the cups. “There,” she says, and lowers the pot triumphantly. “All yours.”

  “Thank you.” Persephone lifts her teacup and takes a sip. It’s very British tea, made with milk rather than lemon juice and served in a porcelain cup instead of a glass. She has made an effort to accustom herself to it, but the mouthfeel is still subtly wrong to her. “On the matter of our doom I believe the jury is still out, but the situation is changing at present, and not necessarily for the better.”

  “This is bad news, isn’t it? Is it anything to do with whatever happened to the binding oath last week?” The woman watches her guardedly.

  Persephone puts her cup down. “When you’re contemplating and cloud watching, do you ever pay attention to the contrails, Iris?”

  Iris Carpenter, former Field Ops manager turned traitor, looks surprised, then shakes her head. “Why would I? A turkey with clipped wings shouldn’t stare at eagles, the silly thing would only get ideas above its station—”

  “No.” Persephone cuts her off with a wave of her hand. “Not what I mean. Would you notice if the contrails stopped?”

  “What?” Iris’s eyes widen. “Why on earth are you talking about contrails?” Her teacup rattles on its saucer as she pushes back from the table.

  “There was an incident a couple of weeks ago. A black swan. I thought you might have noticed the lack of overflights. That’s all.”

  “An incident.” Wide-eyed but in no way innocent, Iris stares back at her. She’s out of touch, but surely not that out of touch—inmates here are permitted some access to outside news, albeit only via a heavily censored camp newsletter. “Another 9/11? No, you wouldn’t bother to come here just to tell me that, would you. It must be the oath. Do you really think I…” She trails off as her facial muscles slacken in fear. “No, I didn’t, you can’t think—”

  “I don’t, you can relax.” Persephone smiles, even though there’s no cause for reassurance. “There was a major incursion and it shut down air travel over the whole of Western Europe, but everything’s under control, we got on top of it and the intrusion is fully contained.” Across the table Iris is just short of hyperventilating with anxiety. “It came from an unanticipated source, nothing to do with your people, and you’re in the clear. Sit down.”

  At the crack of her voice Iris drops back into the chair she’s half-risen from. “What?”

  “Your coreligionists were not involved. Unfortunately,” Persephone continues, “there were complications.”

  “Complications.” With a visible effort Iris collects herself and folds her hands in her lap.

  “We’re right out in the open. Mass casualties and total organizational exposure. You may be amused to know that your former office dogsbody Howard had to front for the agency on Newsnight last week. Hearings in Parliament, select committee hearings, public enquiries, that sort of goings-on. They were talking about legislative supervision, an enabling act, appointing a minister. And then the thing that now runs the Black Chamber got to them. Hence the—disturbance—you noticed.”

  “You are joking.” It comes out as a horrified whisper.

  Persephone can’t help herself: she giggles at Iris’s expression. “Oh you! You should see yourself. Anyone would think I’d announced the return of the Black Phar—”

  “Don’t take his name in vain!” Iris stands suddenly and marches over to the door, then stops with one hand on the latch. She takes a deep breath, then another. “Don’t jerk me around,” she says, her voice huskily overcontrolled. “You don’t need to yank my choke chain, Ms. Hazard. You know what I am and you’ve got me where you want me, here for the past six years: fine, isn’t that enough for you? There’s no need to gloat!”

  A stillness hangs in the air between them.

  “No,” says Persephone, “there isn’t, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you. I’m not here to gloat. What I mean to say is, things have gone drastically wrong, and in a way none of us ever foresaw. The Cabinet Office agenda and the public-private partnership process doesn’t know anything about ancient gods and nightmares, Iris. Their world is all about austerity politics and balancing the budget in time for the next but one general election instead of winning the war against sleep. We know how to deal with soul-stealing horrors, not dea
th from above by legal sleight-of-hand. Your way and our way—we still disagree about the means, but the goal is survival, yes? The new reality, though, is that we came under the scrutiny of superiors who fundamentally don’t believe in anything except the size of their bank accounts and the number of nonexecutive directorships of public corporations they can retire into when they quit politics. And they’ve been bought and sold by the enemy without even noticing. Which is why, when an order in council came down from the Cabinet Office yesterday, dissolving the agency with immediate effect, we moved onto Continuity Operations. And that’s when whatever was left of your oath finally dissolved.”

  Iris Carpenter, formerly a midlevel executive within Q-Division Field Operations (and Bob Howard’s line manager), also High Priestess of the Lambeth Temple of the Cult of the Black Pharaoh, and finally a permanent resident of Camp Sunshine, turns to face Persephone. “Don’t you people ever give up?” she whispers; then, louder, “What do you want from me? Isn’t it over yet?”

  “It’s never over until the agency has no more use for us, you should know that. And by the way, we know that back in the day you didn’t break your oath of office—you bent it, most certainly, so extensively that the working group is still trying to establish how exactly you did it—but you still belong to us. On some level. The oath is merely a marker. And now we’re calling it in.”

  Persephone stands up and recites in a singsong voice, “Oh dear, all that tea has gone straight to my bladder! I’d better go and powder my nose right away. I think I’ll just leave my handbag here where it’s safe. There’s a spare exit token from the camp in the side pocket, I hope it’s still there when I get back, I’d be in terrible trouble if it goes missing and I only thought to check it when I got back to London.” She nods at the now-gaping Iris and pushes past her, opening the door to the outside world. “Good luck.”

  And then she’s gone.

  * * *

  For the next couple of weeks after the escape from the POW camp, I am a fugitive from justice. I’m also hiding from my own conscience, but I won’t burden you overmuch with that. But boy have things changed!

  In the old days of, say, 1984, if you went on the run you’d try to do everything with cash. Pay for cheap hotel rooms, shop in supermarkets, lose yourself in the crowd. Forged papers were still plausible. Hell, forged checks and credit cards were still a thing. Your biggest risk was being recognized by a cop, either spotting your face from the MOST WANTED poster down the nick, or by running the poster past a bored hotel desk clerk who’d seen you the night before. So you’d do your best to stick to the anonymity of crowds or stay out of sight completely. Oh, and avoiding the cameras was easy: there weren’t any. Well, there were a few—some big stores had them to deter shoplifters and catch staff stealing from the tills—but there was no mechanism for the cops to monitor them.

  Today, we’ve got networked cameras everywhere. Everyone carries a mobile phone, but it’s a tracking device that can report your location if the cops know your number and can get a warrant. (Which, for a murder suspect, they most certainly can.) Cash? To buy anything, you need plastic, and it will be checked online to the bank for any significant purchase. So you might think that hiding out would be ridiculously difficult, if not impossible—but you’re not thinking like a state security agency.

  There’s a goddam script on my phone. Not the software kind; I mean a series of activities for me to perform, in sequence. So after I leave Cassie and Alex in their safe house, I go into zombie mode—you know what that looks like, the guy shuffling along the pavement, head downturned to gaze into the depths of his glowing Palantir—and obey the instructions a twenty-first-century Lamplighter has installed on my phone. (Lamplighters: they’re the dudes who set up the safe houses for the spies in all the le Carré movies and ensure there’s milk in the fridge, bugs in the bedstead, and nobody watching the target. That’s a real job within the security services.)

  Now, as I’ve already said, Bob Howard is not my true name. (If you need to ask why I don’t use it, you obviously haven’t been adequately briefed on powers of binding, geasa, and how they work.) What the SA handed me in that envelope was: a sterile smartphone with a bunch of extremely paranoid security upgrades and a burner SIM card, a driving license, a passport, debit and credit cards, and a warrant card bound to Continuity Operations. All in the name of, oh, let’s call him Bob Howard 2.0: a fresh new working alias. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that this represents the very tip of an enormous iceberg of plausible lies.

  Passports are issued by the Identity and Passport Service, a rather quiet department that maintains a biometric database of the roughly eighty-five percent of the British adult population who hold passports. This passport is genuine—so the README on my phone assures me—which means, by extension, the Lamplighters for Continuity Ops must have rooted the IPS database. Otherwise any attempt to use the Bob 2.0 passport will result in my biometrics being queried with that database and linking back to the Bob 1.0 identity. I don’t know who rooted the IPS—probably our friends from MI5, for their own purposes, or possibly the police undercover intelligence folks—but realizing it’s been done at all is a holy fuck moment, because once you’ve got a genuine verified passport identity, you can get all the other stuff you’re going to need if you’re hiding out. Driving license? Yup. Credit cards? As long as you can fake out Experian and Equifax, sure: break a leg! What I’m holding isn’t a false identity—it’s a terrifyingly real one that’s been injected into the government’s own ID verification system and will hold up to official scrutiny unless CESG realize one of the crown jewel databases has been hacked by their own side. Of course, the passport’s no good for foreign travel: the instant you enter a country you’ve visited before on your previous ID, they’ll spot the identical biometrics. But as long as I stay within the UK, the only way I’ll be recognized is by eyeball, human or mechanical.

  So, some nice person has provisioned my phone with a secure password database and a bunch of apps for useful services. Airbnb, Uber, that kind of thing, all linked to a genuine fake credit card backed by real money and a credit history stretching back a decade. It goes further than that. The phone has a Gmail account with a bot that helpfully sends human-looking emails back and forth, and Twitter and Facebook accounts ditto, to generate a plausible internet habit that won’t trigger any trawls at GCHQ, because I’m under no illusions: they’ll have figured out that former SOE operatives have gone off the reservation and there will be a full-dress security panic in progress this week. And there’s a version of OFCUT that points at secure servers that aren’t hosted in the Laundry’s usual server farms.

  Back to the script. There is a hoodie and a pair of dark glasses waiting for me in a neat bag by the door. I put them on, cringing somewhat. If Ops have been this thorough so far, there’s no chance that SCORPION STARE will pick me up, but there are always the other camera networks. I hope there’s something about … oh. Call an Uber, have it take me to this shopping center, go to level one and look for that hair salon, reservation in the name of Boris Johnson. Make sure you’re seen by Dave, he’s a trusted resource. So I spend a couple of hours having my eyebrows reshaped and being taught how to wear and maintain a wig and use some very special makeup that makes me look completely different to infrared cameras, then I go back out and, next checklist item: call an Uber, go there, pick up keys to the Airbnb flat Bob 2.0 is renting for the next three nights (but moving on from a day early), being sure to arrive before five p.m. because a Tesco delivery van is heading your way with food and drink to sign for.

  This is the life of the modern spy on the run: we’ve got an app for that! Stay indoors during daylight hours unless the excursion is mission-critical, because your biggest risk is being recognized by a human being or camera operator. Order food for delivery via supermarket apps. Use Uber to move from temporary house to house at night. Never meet anyone you know face-to-face unless it’s absolutely essential, because network analysis is
a bitch; if you’ve got to attend a meeting, get an Uber to an address a couple of blocks away and walk—and check the approaches to the venue for CCTV cameras first, using Google Street View. You can be perfectly safe inside your own anonymous moving bubble of misery, programmed in advance by Lamplighters who have your best interests at heart.

  If only I could sleep at night.

  While I am being kept in a web 2.0 mediated virtual safe house, using a burner laptop leeching off next door’s Wi-Fi to follow the news, the world outside is moving on.

  The news about SOE being shut down hard has leaked, unsurprisingly. What’s perhaps more surprising—at least, to me—is that it has been met in the press with widespread approval: lots of jerks being interviewed on the news saying “They deserve it,” lots of talking heads commentators saying “Well, it was so obviously a failing agency that…” You can fill in the ellipsis yourself. The fact that there’s no bloody successor agency in place and the nation’s occult defenses are wide open seems to have eluded the peanut gallery; perhaps because the idea that the nation needs defending in this way is such a new ingredient in the public debate that nobody seems to be questioning the line from the cabinet, which is that the police and army are on top of things and a new agency is being set up under proper oversight and will pick up the traces in due course, with help from our NATO allies. It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window.