The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  The night is indeed young, and if he’s reading the signs correctly it’s going to prove a much more memorable affair than the other options that were on his menu—the Defense Electronics Association’s annual dinner or some tedious constituency thing. Anneka from the Planet of the Platinum-Amex Playmates smiles at him with a glint in her eye that makes his pulse race as she raises her glass in a toast. “Your health!” she proposes, then leads him arm in arm towards the ballroom.

  The ambiance in the public rooms of Nether Stowe House is carefully curated, remaining just on the tasteful and up-market side of riotous. Not that Nigel’s anyone to criticize—he was a member of the Piers Gaveston Society back in the ’80s when that prize rotter Graf von Bismarck was running it as a live-action reenactment of Oberst Redl—but it’s interesting to watch. Lots of distinguished men of business wearing DJs and a fair few older women in designer gowns, but the female age distribution skews a couple of decades younger than the men’s and there’s something, something oddly uniform about the girls, as if they’re animated mannequins from the same dress agency window. Servers in dickie bows or old-fashioned maids’ uniforms keep a discreet eye on the level of bubbly in the guests’ glasses. As Anneka leads him through the Grand Hall he hears laughter from the top of the sweeping staircase. He looks up in time to see a piece of prize totty leaning over the banister, displaying side-boob and cleavage down to her navel as she giggles behind her hand at something a milky-skinned Adonis in a leather jockstrap has just told her. “Tonight is your special night,” Anneka purrs in his ear, “you can have anything you want. Anything.” She tugs his arm around her shoulders like a stole. Her glass has disappeared somewhere and she produces a silver pill pot with her gloved left hand, flipping it open to offer him a familiar-looking blue tablet: Pfizer’s little helper. Nigel takes it without a second thought, washing it back with the last of his drink. “Anything at all,” she adds, leaning against him in such a way as to make her meaning clear.

  The drawing room seems to be reserved for movers and shakers sad or staid enough to have brought their spouse along for the evening, but as she draws Nigel towards the rear of the house he recognizes a wilder scene, like a grown-up version of the excesses of his student days and certain discreet private events at Party Conference. He spots a couple of fellow Bullingdon alumni, a younger Saudi prince in mufti, and a couple of MEPs who pointedly fail to make eye contact. They’re all accompanied by toned and tanned arm candy, mostly (but not exclusively) female, appreciatively hanging on their egos. The band is indeed playing swing, but the ballroom floor provides a stage for a small professional dance troupe who retreat between each set to shed more layers of their outfits. The audience mostly stick to the edges, watching from the sidelines or conversing.

  “I must say you know how to make a fellow welcome,” Nigel murmurs in his companion’s ear. “For some reason I wasn’t expecting … well, this.” His wandering gaze takes it all in, a couple billion pounds’ worth of distinguished silverback executives and their glittering constellation of personal entertainers: a euphemism he can just about convince himself fits. (Political probity dictates that nobody here will admit to paying for, or selling, sex for money, but the young and athletic will doubtless leave with their personal finances improved, and the old and the louche with the other side of the coin bankrolled by their host.) “It’s all rather remarkable.”

  “Oh, I can’t take the credit for it; it’s all thanks to our CEO,” Anneka reassures him. “He likes to lay on a good spread and send his guests away happy.” She smiles, reaches out, and snags a champagne flute from a passing waitress, and passes it to him. “Perhaps you’d like to meet him personally?”

  “I’d be very glad to, if he’s around,” Nigel says affably. He feels a warmly benevolent glow of gratitude towards the CEO of GP Services as Anneka tugs his arm down around her waist, squeezing his fingers in friendly reproach—perhaps he’s been trying to move too speedily for her, or she feels this is too public a setting for hanky-panky—but he has to admit to being slightly puzzled. Isn’t the fellow reputed to be some sort of god-bothering sky pilot? But this is a terribly worldly sort of party. “Is he around?”

  “He was earlier, in fact—oh yes! There he is now! I can introduce you briefly and then perhaps I can show you around the rest of the house? There are rooms upstairs if you feel like a lie-down or a massage,” she adds, then turns him towards a distinguished-looking fellow in his fifties with a remarkably full head of silver hair and an avuncular smile. Anneka unglues herself from Nigel’s side and curtsies to him. “Sir! May I introduce the Right Honorable Nigel Irving, Secretary of State for Defense? This is Dr. Raymond Schiller, Chief Executive of GP Services and its subsidiary GP Security.” She stands between them, clutching her hands and smiling anxiously as if unsure which master she wishes most to please.

  “Jolly pleased to meet you, Dr. Schiller.” Nigel dials up the Old English Bonhomie to eleven and offers his hand as a ritual sacrifice. Schiller shakes it with the expected trans-Atlantic nutcracker grip. “I’ve been hearing a lot about your operation lately. Number Ten is keen.” He smiles. “I hear we have you to thank for solving our problem with a certain loose cannon agency.”

  “Oh, call me Raymond. And thanks aren’t necessary: we’re pleased to help out!” Schiller sounds appropriately discreet. “We’re used to handling these matters for the State Department and we have all the clearances. That’s why we were able to make a head start on getting assets into position for the spin-up of the new agency next week. But of course we’re committed to openness and transparency in service to government, and I couldn’t possibly ask for any favors, much less special treatment.”

  Schiller says this with such deadpan sincerity that Nigel almost believes him despite his better judgment. From what Adrian was saying he’d been expecting some sort of dry stick of a fire-and-brimstone preacher man, but Raymond is speaking his language with note-perfect accent. “I look forward to talking later,” he says.

  “Yes, absolutely.” Schiller glances around. “But this really isn’t a business meeting! It’s a party, and if you’ll excuse me, I need to play host and ensure everyone is having a good time.” He smiles broadly. “I gather you’ve made Anneka’s acquaintance?” The girl has her back turned as they speak, offering a pretense of privacy; Nigel’s gaze lingers possessively over her naked shoulder blades, follows the elegant line of her spine down into her dress. “She’s been my executive assistant for the past three years, you know. A remarkable lady; I’m so sad she’s leaving in a couple of weeks, to take up a post as special advisor to Norman Grove.” A minister without portfolio: Nigel feels a flash of jealousy, even though his own post is stratospherically senior to Grove’s. “She can take care of all your requirements, and if you let her know what you want, she’ll make sure it happens.”

  “Really?” Nigel is almost amused, but slightly on edge. And I thought she was—he stifles the thought. “She has hidden depths.”

  “She seems to have taken to you,” Schiller assures him, then winks. “I must circulate, see you later?”

  “Indeed! Until later.”

  As Schiller turns away Nigel begins to follow up the uneasy realization that Schiller’s words jogged loose in his mind. But then Anneka turns to face him, a flash of thigh tantalizingly visible through the slit in her gown. She beams brilliantly, then she steps inside his reaching arm and wraps an arm around him. “Mm-hmm! And now you’ve fulfilled your obligation to your host we’re free for the rest of the evening! Let me show you upstairs? You’ll adore the Old Earl’s Bedroom,” she promises.

  * * *

  “This is ridiculous!” Cassie swears quietly. There’s a hiss and crackle of static as she rubs a fingertip inside her collar, disturbing the hidden microphone. “How am I supposed to not spill the drinks if they keep groping me?”

  I glance across the table. Alex is glaring at the battered laptop in front of him but his fingertips are white with tension. His express
ion is livid. Mhari is making notes on her tablet next to the floor plan 3-view displaying the location of the tagged wineglasses Cassie has handed out. Everyone in the living room of the holiday rental property in the neighboring village that we picked for a field office is uncomfortable. “Situation?” I ask.

  Mhari clears her throat. “That was His Excellency, Prince—”

  I cut Mhari off. “So the wandering hands don’t belong to one of ours,” I say pointedly.

  “No,” she snaps. Aside: “But please don’t let her have a snit about this, we’ve got nobody else who’s remotely as good at this job…”

  “From your lips to the Black Pharaoh’s ears,” I snark. But she’s absolutely right: this wasn’t in the risk matrix we drew up for the mission as originally scoped. When Schiller rented a posh country pad as a venue for boozed-up receptions for business contacts it looked like a good idea to put some of our people on the inside wearing wires. Rooting the vacation cottage and getting a router-level packet monitor on the leased line to the country house wasn’t a huge problem, and that gave us access to the CCTV and a carrier signal for our own roving commentators. The wineglasses are a neat trick. They’re tiny Bluetooth transmitters with resonant contacts that turn the goblets into microphones, reporting back through a couple of rooted smartphones, like the gizmos we planted in the BBC newsroom an eternity ago. It’s the sort of Maxwell Smart hack that used to cost the CIA black budget half a billion to develop in the ’60s but is off-the-shelf from a Chinese toy factory these days. Where we ran into trouble was in getting past GP Security’s vetting. It’s dismayingly professional, and the weak corner of our coverage envelope is the human factor. In the end our ability to kibitz on Schiller’s shindig was entirely dependent on us being able to get an experienced infiltration asset who wasn’t on any national databases (fingerprint, DNA, Immigration, or other) and who could sweet-talk—or englamour—their way past the door and replace a contract catering body. Subtype: unskilled, or at least trainable at a day’s notice.

  People like that are hard to get at short notice, but Cassie Brewer, the Queen of Air and Darkness herself, fits the bill—at least in her previous capacity as Agent First of Spies and Liars. She can steal your face and your memories, change her appearance to match if she’s got enough thaumic mojo on hand. Convincing everyone she comes into contact with that she’s just a waitress working for a contract agency barely qualifies as a warm-up exercise. Persuading her to rebind her command of the Host so that Alex is the fallback All-Highest if anything happens to her was the hard part; but don’t underestimate the incredible motivational power of the boredom that arises from being bubble-wrapped in a government detention block for a couple of weeks.

  So here we are, huddling together around a bunch of computers in a safe house down the road from Nether Stowe House, recording and tracking a bunch of smart bugs around the ground floor and listening in on Cassie’s subvocalized stream of consciousness as she ferries trays of champagne flutes, white wine spritzers, and the occasional apple juice between the scullery and the function spaces of the mansion. And I find myself drifting off, trying to put myself into her head in order to get a better feel for what’s going on …

  * * *

  This sucks—but it sucks slightly less than being stuck in that camp, thinks Cassie, as she backs through the entrance to the scullery carrying a mostly empty tray swimming in spilled bubbly.

  When Alex’s sometime boss put his proposal to them both, she’d been very excited. The camp on Dartmoor was tedious and lacking in amenities—no Internet access, not even cable TV: just a DVD player, a chessboard, and the rain. They’d given up questioning her after the third interrogator’s breakdown and focused on Alex, who had sworn horribly at the manual typewriter but persisted in writing up an extensive report. But that left her with nothing to do—well, aside from being with Alex, and you can’t stay in bed all the time. Her offer to organize an amateur production of The Great Escape using the knights and officers of the Host billeted in the other wings of the camp had been received with an inexplicable lack of enthusiasm by Captain Marks, and for their part, her sworn vassals seemed to be trying to avoid her. It was almost as if they blamed her for this mess, rather than her father! So Mr. Howard’s offer to get them both out of the camp and find something useful for them to do sounded like a really good idea, even before the nasty soul-parasites and their castrated urük slaves turned up, though Alex had been a total wet blanket about it until she very firmly told him it was going to happen.

  But now …

  “What a mess! Dump that in the sink and take this one—try not to spill anything this time!” Lisa, the woman running the scullery, points her chin at a waiting tray of glasses on the side table and gives Cassie a pointed glare as she continues to fill glasses, a spare bottle clamped in her left hand. “Why did you—no, don’t tell me.” She shakes her head. “Where do they get these people from?” Lisa demands of the ceiling, “the local Jobcentre?”

  Cassie ducks her head submissively and reaches for the next tray just as the door behind her slams open and another waiter called Ben prances in, holding a tray of empties. She nearly jerks the tray but manages to stop herself just short, waits for Ben to pass on his way to the dishwasher, then picks up the fresh load and turns towards the exit. “Take those upstairs,” Lisa snaps at her, “back staircase, round past the kitchen, snap to it!”

  Live-action Downton Abbey cosplay spying had sounded like fun when Mr. Howard suggested it, but now that Cassie’s having second thoughts, it’s too late to back out. It seems to be all about being shouted at by horrible people while wearing a ridiculous uniform, avoiding sleazy old men’s wandering hands, and trying not to stumble and spill the drinks in heels. And if 007 is here he’s keeping a low profile.

  The servants’ corridors snake around the back of the grand house, a late eighteenth-century addition to keep the below-stairs staff out of the way of their betters. The floors are uncarpeted boards and flagstones, the passages narrow, and the back stairs are steep and poorly illuminated. Cassie takes up her dozen champagne flutes and climbs to the first floor where there’s a landing with a deeply recessed window ledge. She breathes deeply and puts her tray down, then reaches into the pocket of her apron for a sheet of what look like shiny self-adhesive stickers the size of ten-pence pieces. She peels off four of them at a time and transfers each one from her fingertips to the base of a glass until she empties the sheet. It’s only the work of a minute, but she’s sweating nervously by the time she finishes, because there’s no way to deflect suspicion if anyone spots her doing it, and while it’d be easy enough to make them forget, the signs of mental tampering may be evident to the security staff. There are adepts here, maybe even magi. However nobody interrupts her, and a minute later she straightens her dress, picks up the tray, breathes deeply, and carries on up the staircase.

  The upper floor of the house is laid out around a long corridor with a landing opening onto the grand staircase, with shorter passages trailing up each wing of the house from either end. Cassie slips through a concealed panel in the wall of the main corridor and walks along it, glancing through open doorways. (On her last trip she made the mistake of opening one of the closed bedroom doors in the east wing. It was educational, but it’s not a mistake she’ll make again.) Most of the open-doored rooms are empty, so she nips inside and replaces any empties among the refreshments on each side table. The doorway at the back above the ballroom opens onto a balcony with sofas and occasional tables. It’s open and there are guests, so she enters and makes a circuit, face frozen in an ingratiating smile.

  Half a dozen of the guests have made it up here: all middle-aged to elderly white men in dinner jackets. A couple have lit cigars, and all are in need of refreshments—both for themselves and their much younger escorts. “Hey darling”—one of them flashes her a gold tooth—“why don’t you lose the tray and come join me? You’re wasted as a waitress!” He’s happy but somewhat unhinged in a way that C
assie associates with coke or meth, so she widens her smile, shakes her head, and sways her hips around the edge of his wobbly arm’s reach. “Come here!”

  “Got a job to do,” she says mildly, and steps away.

  One of the girls takes mercy on her. She grabs two full champagne flutes, and turns to face the grabby guy. “Here you are, sweetie, let me be your waitress,” Cassie hears the companion tell him before he has time to flip from bubbly to sullen. Then Cassie turns the corner of the balcony, only to find herself face-to-face with an elegantly groomed copper-haired woman. She manages to stop dead without spilling the drinks, which is a good thing because this woman clearly thinks she’s someone in authority, and the dry-cleaning bill for her gown would wipe out Cassie’s paycheck for the night. “I don’t remember hiring you,” the woman says accusingly. “Why are you here?” She speaks with a faint Irish accent; her eyes are as cold as camera lenses, and Cassie feels her hackles tense, for there is something subtly wrong about her.

  “The agency called me up this afternoon.” Cassie is defensive, her pulse speeding. “Something about one of their regulars being off sick? Vomiting bug? Who are you?”

  The woman studies her for a moment, scanning and categorizing. “Bernadette McGuigan of GP Security Systems. I’m in charge of personnel here. You’re serving for Lisa Geissler, is that correct? What’s your name?” Cassie notices that she wears a discreet undecorated cross on a plain silver chain around her neck; the symbolism seems oddly out of keeping with the rest of this party. A reek of occult power hangs about Bernadette, unsettling and sweetly rotten, but Cassie doesn’t dare to open her mind and look: if this woman is a practitioner, she’ll spot the intrusion.