There are a couple of rays of metaphorical sunlight. Mhari has apparently found a source of blood for the PHANGs. It may not last for long, but they’re not going to starve or go feral. (The last thing we need on top of everything else right now is a V syndrome epidemic in London.) The crumblies from St. Hilda’s have apparently bluffed their way into some sort of sheltered living halfway house arrangement by pretending to be senile, and I am informed that they’re cautiously, gradually, showing signs of re-engaging with the cutout who’s serving as their minder from Continuity Ops. Likewise, our drinking buddies from the SRR are still on speaking terms, and willing to see that the odd OCCULUS unit shows up should we need it (on an entirely deniable it’s-just-a-routine-readiness-exercise basis—and this is a card we can play only once). And on a purely personal note, everything is coming up daisies.
But otherwise it’s darkness, darkness, as far as the eye can see.
Something bad is happening in Assyria, but our last stringer on the ground was beheaded live on YouTube by Islamic State. There’s a marked upswing in terrorist atrocities in that part of the world and some of the incidents … they’re not being allowed to hit the mainstream media channels, let’s put it that way, nobody wants a mass panic. Da’esh propaganda websites are fulminating about Western devils and if you drop the compass angle they’re not entirely wrong: the djinn are restive, and I am not talking about the goatee-and-turban three-wishes Disney remix of the dark and bloody legend.
In Mexico there’s been a mass kidnapping and disappearance of student teachers—forty-two of them—at Iguala in Guerrero. No bodies have been found. It’s being blamed on a drugs syndicate with help from corrupt local police officials, but as I read about it in the daily flash briefing that someone working for Continuity Ops is still putting out via secure departmental email I’m not giving that much credit. Worshippers of Tezcatlipoca, the Cult of the Smoking Mirror, are no neophytes at the human sacrifice game, let’s put it that way.
The United States is still disturbingly quiet. A couple of resignations and retirements of deputy assistant secretaries of this or that, a couple of new appointments to the Republican National Committee, nothing terribly visible to outsiders. We used to use the Kremlin as a reference point for politics utterly opaque to external observers, but the complexities of DC and the depths of the waters there are breathtaking. The only obvious sign of the power struggle in progress is that the number of actors represented by the United States Intelligence Community clearinghouse has dropped from eighteen to sixteen in the past month, due to mergers—and it’s only obvious that a titanic and brutal struggle for supremacy is in progress if you know what signs to look for. There are other symptoms (our thaum flux distant monitoring array is picking up twenty or thirty intermittent titanic power spikes per day, as if someone or something is working major summonings in diverse states across the continental US), but it’s frustratingly hard to tell what’s going on from the outside … and our few remaining stringers on the ground have stopped filing reports.
In our absence, a lot of the low-level occult defense tasks we took care of are falling apart. There has been an outbreak of “demonic possession” in Aberystwyth, claiming the lives of two pensioners at a Pentecostal Church. Séances have become markedly dangerous, with eighteen survivors being sectioned under the Mental Health Act in the past week alone, but so far the Health Secretary has stayed mum.
And finally there’s the catastrophically bad news from back home. Due to the lack of anyone running routine security maintenance tasks on the Laundry’s server farms—80 percent of which are still running, at least until the power bills come due—a failure to install a critical patch for a zero-day exploit that came out a week ago has resulted in the firmware blobs that install SCORPION STARE capability on one of the nation’s most common outdoor camera systems being leaked. The first word we got was when it turned up for auction on the usual darknet sites, with a £25 million opening bid: activity has been fierce. It’ll take a while before anyone works out how to decompile the deep observing neural network code, much less figures out how it works.
But when they do?
Oh dear.
PART III
SURRENDER
EIGHT
BETRAYAL
Euston Station, London, marks the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line, one of the two main north-south railway arteries that tie England and Scotland together. Right now it’s horrendously busy. The East Coast Main Line runs through Leeds and will not be back in service for at least two weeks; while some passenger services are diverting around the devastated city’s station, all the freight and a good proportion of the foot traffic are using the west coast route instead.
Around the same time Mo and I are rebonding over a pizza, a bottle of wine, and a pile of broken yesterdays, a Virgin Voyager slides into Euston and wheezes to a halt. Doors streaked with dirt after the two-hundred-mile run from Liverpool rattle and hiss open and passengers spill across the busy platform.
Concealed within the crowd of weary travelers is a middle-aged woman. Her dark blonde hair is streaked with gray and frizzled; her face is lined and there are crow’s feet around her eyes, but she’s trim and her posture erect. Wearing boots, jeans, and a sweater, with a waterproof and a small day pack over her shoulder, she might be on her way home from a hiking holiday in the Lake District. But as she casts around, looking for someone, there’s an anxious, haunted aspect to her expression, and whenever she spots the anonymous black bubble of a camera she tenses slightly and hunches her shoulders.
Iris Carpenter is coming home.
Her instructions were clear and comprehensive, from the token to get her past the unsleeping alien guards to the road directions to Kendal. The train ticket in the wallet took her to Liverpool, and then onwards via a reserved seat on the express to Euston; there’d even been some petty cash for food and drink on the four-hour trip. She’d bought a couple of newspapers at Lime Street Station and spent the journey luxuriating in the unfamiliar sensation of uncensored, unrationed text at her fingertips. Little things kept tripping her up. The simple act of opening a door required a conscious act of will, the recollection that she was allowed to do whatever she wanted. Merely existing in motion was a constant tightrope walk across the infinite chasm of free will. The habits ingrained from six years spent deep in the penumbral constraints of Camp Sunshine would take more than a railway trip to shake off.
En route, Iris gave serious thought to the possibility of fleeing. The Hazard woman frankly scared her. One of the big eldritch beasts of Mahogany Row, she presented a coolly composed cosmetic mask to the world that concealed screaming depths of ruthlessness that dwarfed anything Iris recognized from her own esoteric order. Persephone was capable of anything, that much Iris could see at a glance, like that old creep Angleton. Iris merely saw the agency as a storm cellar against the tornados of the abyss.
If I had any sense I’d have gotten off in Birmingham and gone to ground, Iris tells herself as she looks around the platform, following the milling crowd towards the automatic ticket barriers. But the newspapers have convinced her otherwise, with the rising hysteria and demands that something must be done, the picking over of the wreckage and the postmortem in parliamentary committee. The sum of all fears has come to pass, and her own attempt at furnishing a storm shelter has already failed. If the news out of Leeds is in any way accurate, then it’s only a matter of time before things go from bad to unimaginably worse. And it isn’t just Leeds: the world news pages tell their own story, of things better left undisturbed stirring in unquiet death on all sides, from Chile to Alabama, Kamchatka to South Sudan.
Iris feeds her ticket to the barrier—new since she last passed through this station—and walks up the ramp from the platform’s end into the crowded station concourse. Being able to go so far in a straight line without facing a barbed wire barrier is disorienting and feels unreal, like a dream of walking on the moon. A quick mental audit reminds her that she has
precisely £19.23 to her name. Not enough to run anywhere in London: buying a one-day Travelcard valid for the three inner zones would eat nearly half her remaining money. They’ve been careful not to leave too much slack in her leash. Proceed to the front of the station, turn right onto Euston Road, go to The Rocket, and await contact. The instructions are explicit and simple and fill her with dread. Await contact.
It’s unseasonably cold on Euston Road, the street clogged with double-decker buses and taxis as night falls. The pub is easy enough to find, but busy: the benches out front are full of smokers, and there is only standing room indoors. Iris pushes wearily through the miasma of dying cigarettes and stale beer that haunts the entrance and walks towards the bar. Almost in spite of herself she feels a frisson of anticipation: it has been years since she last tasted beer. It feels like an indecent luxury. She orders a pint of Younger’s Best and glances around just in time to spot a knot of braying loose-tied office yahoos breaking up, abandoning their empty glasses at a table with a couple of high cast-iron stools. Old reflexes die hard and Iris hastily moves in, then settles down to wait.
In just ten minutes she politely fights off two attempts to join her—not pickup lines at her age, just pushy oafs with no sense of personal space—and manages to refrain from lowering the level of her beer glass by more than a centimeter. (If she finishes it and has to return to the bar she’ll lose her seat.) It’s a hard, personal struggle, for the sharply fruity and somewhat sweet taste of the ale is a revelation, dragging old memories out of storage and marching them across the dusty proscenium of her attention. But there’s no sign of her contact, and she’s debating whether she should in fact be waiting here at all, when someone looms over her shoulder. “Do you mind if I sit here?” he asks.
“Sorry, I’m waiting for—” She swallows the rest of her automatic brush-off. “Oh.”
“Yes.” He smiles faintly and slides his overcoat off his suit jacket, folds it neatly, and places it on the stool beside her. “I shall be back presently.” And then he ghosts across to the bar to order a drink.
Iris stares at Dr. Armstrong’s receding back, blinking furiously, then takes a deep mouthful of beer. As she puts her glass back down she spills a little across the tabletop; her hands are shaking. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, an inner voice chirps inanely. For some reason she’d been expecting Angleton, or maybe someone senior from Field Ops. The presence of an Auditor is deeply disturbing, as if she’s been walking down a staircase in the darkness and her foot has landed where a tread should be and is not. He has the power to bind tongues to silence and to coerce loquacious confession with a word. Worse, he carries the full power of the oath of office. He can make a traitor’s tongue catch fire in their mouth. And even if he has stepped down from the Audit Committee and returned to his previous role within the organization, he cannot be described as anything less than formidable.
Dr. Armstrong somehow manages to be served immediately. He returns from the bar before Iris, still vacillating, can decide whether to stay or go. He’s carrying a beer glass and two tumblers with a tall measure of amber liquid in each.
“Cheers,” he says, sliding a whisky glass in front of her.
“Oh for…” She sniffs the tumbler, wide-eyed. “What’s happening, Mike?”
“I thought you might like a little celebration. Your release, your return to service, or something like that.” Her fingers tense, preparing to throw the drink in his face. “Although I would quite understand if you’d prefer to take early retirement. It’s the least we can do for you.”
She takes a sip of the whisky. It’s a very good Speyside. She puts the glass down with exaggerated care. “What”—her voice is shaky—“is going on?”
Dr. Armstrong shrugs regretfully. “We owe you an apology.”
Suddenly, refraining from throwing her whisky in his face seems like a bad decision. “It’s been six years!”
“Yes, well.” Dr. Armstrong is discomfited. “That mistakes were made only became clear a couple of weeks ago. Along with the nature of the mistakes, I might add. Ends and means, Iris. Ends and means.”
“I’ve lost—” She takes a deep breath. “Fuck.” It trips off her tongue more easily than the alternative, the explosive, everything.
“Yes.” He looks at her, stone-faced. “I take full responsibility.”
“Why?” she cries quietly.
“Iris. Look at me.” Dr. Armstrong reaches across the table and takes her beer-sticky hand in his. “Listen to me. Grimalkin, Septangle, Concorde, Wolf. Execute Sitrep One, Mrs. Carpenter.”
Iris defocuses. The world around her loses texture as she hears herself reciting words from a very great distance, as far away as Camp Sunshine. “Subjective integrity maintained. Subjective continuity maintained. Subject observes no tampering.”
“Exit supervision.” Armstrong glances at her whisky, deceptively casually. “That concludes your role in Operation CONSTITUENCY. You might want to drink that now.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Because it’s the best they had in the house, and shouldn’t go to waste. Nothing less than you deserve.”
Iris looks at the glass for a moment, then glares at him and tosses the entire measure back in one defiant, convulsive gulp. Dr. Armstrong watches for the entire duration of the ensuing coughing fit, but holds his counsel.
“What now?” she finally asks hoarsely. “Why now? Why me?”
The SA makes a steeple of his fingers. “Are you up to date on the news from Yorkshire?”
“I think—I read the papers on the train down—is it as bad as it looks?”
“It’s worse. Infinitely worse. Everything we’ve been working for, all the sacrifices you made—it’s all going to be in vain. The idiots in Whitehall are trying to sell us down the river. They liquidated the agency and they’re trying to outsource the remains of ops to a fellow called Raymond Schiller, who just happens to be the current host of the Sleeper in the Pyramid. The Prime Minister belongs to him. The Cabinet Office is his plaything. His followers have riddled the Black Chamber like maggots in a coffin, they’re making a power play in Washington, DC, and now it very much looks as if they’re trying to take over here as well.”
“No. That can’t be. It’s not possible.”
“I’m afraid it is,” he says gently. Her shoulders are shaking as she reaches for her other glass. “All the good work you did, all the sacrifices you made—running the CONSTITUENCY honeypot, all the sanctioned horrors—all thrown away by the idiots who run the country.”
Iris begins to tear up. “Not possible. Damn them!”
“I am informed that there’s still time to turn it around, but we’re going to have to act fast and it’s going to be very ugly indeed. There are some delicate negotiations to be undertaken, and the question of a new chain of command. The agency has provisions for Continuity, but for now most hands are raised against us.”
“Well fuck … what do you want me to do? I assume that’s why you brought me here? Do you want to swear me in again, bind me to this Continuity thing? You know there’s no love lost between my Master and the Sleeper?”
“Yes, and you are correct: you’re an escaped detainee, on the blacklist if any of the bumbling cretins who’re going through the agency’s files think to look: clearly not one of us. So I’m going to administer a new oath—there’s no conflict of interest—and tonight you’re going to check into a hotel. Your choice, I don’t need to know which. There’s a clean credit card, ID, a smartphone, and a few little extras, and a PIN for the card in here”—Dr. Armstrong hands her an envelope—“and you’re going to catch some sleep, because tomorrow you’re going to play tourist.” He gives her a crooked smile. “Have you ever visited the Tower of London? There’s some fascinating history there—some of it still in the making.”
* * *
It has been a busy month for Raymond Schiller. Organizing and supervising the special parties at Nether Stowe House is a grind, even after his direct
oversight is no longer required all the time. Bernadette McGuigan, herself now a handmaid and initiate of the Inner Temple, is able to run most of the proceedings, with the assistance of security supervisor Dan Berry and Phil in the Events Management Department, but Schiller is the prize draw, the golden handshake that attracts the guests like moths to a flame as word about the private prayer sessions gets around—and a certain amount of seduction and flesh-pressing still falls to him.
This is as nothing compared to the mechanics of setting up the UK arm of GP Security to handle the operational responsibilities of the vanquished enemy, and to contain the damage spreading from the rogue occult intelligence agency that has been allowed free rein for too long. The mop-up is proceeding to plan, although a worrying proportion of the target’s senior personnel are still missing, having scuttled into dark corners like vermin; but with their lines of funding severed at the source they won’t remain effective for long. Schiller has been spending too much of his precious time at the complex near Heathrow, chairing committee meetings and establishing lines of control. Luckily he has been able to delegate: Anneka, busy working with Minister Grove, has actually inserted herself into his staff as a special advisor (with a nod and a wink to Adrian Redmayne in the Cabinet Office for seeing to it). Greedy, ideologically driven, and a fellow traveler by inclination, Grove is almost too good to be true; the sooner Anneka initiates him into the Inner Temple the better. But they have hit an obstacle: Anneka has determined that Grove is not going to be an easy initiation. Political zeal and shared interest in turning a profit is all very well, but personal matters have stalled progress towards his induction—
“It’s not my fault he’s a sodomite,” Anneka interrupts Schiller’s musing from the other side of the enormous and luxuriously appointed living room. She leans back on the sofa and stretches, then smiles a come-hither smile. Pencil skirt, high heels, silk-sheathed legs converging: Schiller forces himself to look away, his pulse speeding. “You see?” she adds. “Most men can’t help it, the pupillary reaction is there even if they point their gaze somewhere else. Grove simply isn’t interested. But when he sees a hunky young man—”
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