“Enough, please.” Schiller waves his hand as if attempting to disperse a foul odor. “1 Corinthians 6:9 is incontrovertibly—”
“Superseded by the Third Revelation of St. Enoch?” Anneka smiles lasciviously and slowly spreads her knees.
Schiller takes a deep breath. “Now is not the time, for the mortification of the flesh draws near…”
Anneka hisses irritably and for a moment her host glares at him. “I’m hungry. The prey merely leads me on a longer pursuit than usual; I’ll reap his soul for our Lord in the end. In person, or by taking for myself a vessel, a Ganymede who will—”
“Stop. Stop right now.” Schiller glares at his unruly handmaid. He has overindulged Anneka disgracefully since initiating her in the back of the BMW the month before, he realizes. After the initial shock and pain she has grown to take delight in her new power, and more; for as the Third Revelation explains, to those of the Inner Temple no delight will be forbidden once the kingdom of the Lord arrives on Earth, and that’s the work they are engaged in right now. If Schiller wasn’t queasily troubled by his own imagination when he visualizes what it would be like to slowly undress Grove himself, the remains of his Baptist indoctrination wouldn’t have bubbled to the surface, with its legacy of hellfire and damnation. “Enough. We’ll get to Mr. Grove in due course. Make sure he’s on the special invite list to the next party.” That’s the list of those who qualify for the full VIP cost-no-object treatment, helicopters and cocaine and oiled, nubile bodies: access all areas. Schiller’s own host takes over, and he hears his throat forming words in a language no human larynx was meant to speak: “I will take him for mine own if it comes to it, Daughter.”
Anneka’s host retreats. She sits up primly, knees together. “Yes, Father.” She pauses. “What else?”
Schiller glances at his wristwatch. “It’s almost eight. Where are they?”
“I can check.” Anneka’s laptop sits atop her briefcase, on the coffee table. She clicks away for a minute. “Not far, they should be here within ten minutes. Traffic diversions near the Blackwall Tunnel, I think.”
“Well and good.” Schiller breathes deeply. “The next party is the last one before Parliament is due to go into recess. I think we should strive to induct our friends Grove, Redmayne, and Irving. The PM will be an adequate bellwether, I believe. Their personal security might be problematic, however…”
“I believe I can take care of that,” Anneka volunteers. “They’ll only be accompanied by two bodyguards at most for an event at a private estate on the Foreign Office cleared list—it’s not like the United States.” (Public officials in the United States of America are unusually [even uniquely] well guarded by the standards of other democratic nations.) “I’ll have Dan slip them the roofies and Bernadette can store them in a warded cellar until we can Elevate them. In extremis we could send them to Heathrow for initiation into the Middle Temple. If our Lord will provide, I’m sure a couple of our people under cover of a suitable glamour will be able to replace them with no one the wiser, at least for an evening.”
“Hmm.” Schiller thinks about it. “As long as the substitution takes place as close to his induction as possible, I believe it will work. Once our friend Jeremy has joined us in the Inner Temple his guards are surplus to requirements.” He smiles. “It is asking a lot of you, though—of you and of Bernadette and of my other handmaids—to bring your grace to so many men.” Schiller has only brought five handmaids into the Inner Temple since his arrival in the UK. The question of who he can trust is troubling, as is the not inconsiderable effort and pain of growing new distal segments after each initiation. Obeying the injunction to be fruitful and multiply is distressingly time-consuming: at this rate it could take months of doubling cycles before the entire adult population of the British Isles have been blessed by the Lord of the New Flesh.
“Can you Elevate some more sisters to work alongside us?” She smiles back at him. “I’m sure your host is nearly ripe again.”
“There are no suitable”—Schiller changes tack—“but that won’t matter anymore, will it.”
“Not once our Lord numbers the most important members of the cabinet among his faithful congregation?”
“Indeed.”
Anneka gives him a long look. She is unusually perceptive, for a handmaid, Schiller notes. All too often the shock of induction damages something, renders them incurious or dreamily withdrawn, as if soul-burned. But not Anneka, the jewel in his crown. When he installed her host, bringing her into direct communion with the Lord without an intermediary, it seemed to awaken something in her. The arrival of the millennium has freed her from her feminine sense of sin and shame, but it has also unlocked her potential. If it wasn’t the host of the Lord himself that she nurtures within her womb, he might almost take her for the Scarlet Whore of Babylon: she is insatiable for converts, zealous in her pursuit of the mission, and frighteningly ambitious. “Are you sure,” she asks slowly, “that you are not unconsciously delaying the inevitable because it suits you to be the only man in our Lord’s house?”
“I wouldn’t—” Schiller meets Anneka’s amethyst gaze, lips suddenly dry. Someone else looks back at him, the bell-like clarity of her voice striking echoing chimes in the back of his head. His Lord is surfacing in her mind, finally awakening to perceive itself through the prism of her soul. The Sleeping God’s noosphere expands with each Inner Temple initiate who achieves this state of enlightenment and grace. “Do you think so, my Lady?” he hears himself asking, and anticipates her answer before she gives voice to it.
“I will provide new converts for your baptism,” the half of him that speaks through Anneka replies, “and you will plant your seed in their wombs so that they may be born again as handmaids. I will mold them from high-priced sex workers rather than from the daughters of the Church, and they will spread the good news far and wide; it is time to rapidly expand the ranks of the Lord’s army rather than slowly growing the hands and hearts of the Inner Temple.”
Schiller’s head bows. His host twitches sleepily in his trousers, reminding him who he serves. He can feel the truth in her words, the voice of the Sleeping—slowly awakening—God speaking through her. The Lord is awake, but desperately weak: it needs to broaden its congregation, to gain new worshippers through the holy act of initiation in which a communicant receives the segmented wormlike host that can bond with their central nervous system and join them to the Lord’s growing distributed brain. He has focused over-much, he now realizes, on penetrating and defeating the only agency of government that might react effectively to the Sleeper’s arrival on British soil. Already weakened by an earlier incursion and governed by crass materialists who scoff in the face of God, this nation will be much easier to take than the United States, where rival powers are emerging from the unhallowed shadows. All that remains is to roll up the remnants of the hostile indigenous power and the Kingdom will be his. But, intent on seducing their rulers and milking the venom from their fangs, he has deliberately kept the number of hosts in his team under tight control. Anneka is right. They stand close to triumph; they will soon need more bodies, an army of them to bring about the Kingdom of the Lord on these isles, and the time for restraint is past.
“You are right, Daughter.” He lapses into English, the common tongue. “The party is still a priority, but once you and Bernadette have taken Redmayne, Grove, Irving, and Michaels, there will be no point in holding back any more. Bring them to me here and I shall convert them, and you may direct them to bring more sinners to the Lord.” He smiles when she tuts at him, an impishly conspiratorial expression on her lips. “Now where are the others? We have a meeting to run.”
* * *
While much of Mahogany Row is on the run, hiding underground in scattered safe houses under the aegis of Continuity Operations, some sections are still relatively free to come or go as they will. The haste with which the Cabinet Office abolished the agency led them to make mistakes. Not only have they mistaken the Auditors
for mere accountants, they appear to think that the office of the Chief Counsel, and the Black Assizes themselves, are merely an eccentric and obscure appendage of the Ministry of Justice. Not being on the Laundry payroll as such but accountable to the Supreme Court (formerly the Law Lords), Policy and Legal still occupy offices on Fetter Lane, not far from the Royal Courts of Justice, in a cramped but picturesque building just slightly older than the United States of America. This is where Chris Womack has her office, and this particular morning she is receiving a visit from the Senior Auditor. Even priests need to confess to someone, and the SA is no exception: as Chief Counsel Chris is in a position to give him a reality check on the lawfulness of projects under his supervision, and in turn to provide an unbiased progress report to the Board. (As an Auditor, when monitoring other operations Dr. Armstrong would report to the Board directly, but when managing an operation himself, other rules must perforce apply.)
“So how did it go?”
“I really couldn’t say yet.” Dr. Armstrong sits hunched in his chair, cradling his teacup protectively. His eyes are shadowed and slightly bloodshot: he’s showing signs of stress or sleeplessness. “The cutout listened to me. I believe she’ll do as I asked. There’s a lot … a lot of residual loyalty. More than we have any right to expect. It’s what saw her through her time in the—on the outside.” He chuckles unhappily. “The sunk cost fallacy makes us so easy to predict, sometimes.”
“How long was she in that place?”
“Most of six years.” Dr. Armstrong nods at Womack’s sharp intake of breath. “Yes, exactly. At first it was just for the duration of the COBWEB MAZE wrap-up, but when we couldn’t get a lock on the scope of the mole problem everything dragged on. Unconscionably so. Then OPERA CAPE came up and there was the throw-down between Basil and Old George and it became clear that being penetrated by the Cult of the Black Pharaoh was the least of our problems. And now there’s this.”
“Are you sure she’s still loyal?”
“Yes, absolutely. Which is to say, her overall objectives have always been aligned with those of this organization. She was flexible enough to square her oath of office with leading a congregation of a forbidden faith, but then, we always knew that was possible, didn’t we? And she volunteered in the first place. It was the only way to make sure, at the time…”
“And she’s not embittered in any way by her treatment?”
Dr. Armstrong winces. “You know, when this is put to rest I intend to recommend that we make special accommodations for her. The restoration of her full back pay with interest, for starters. An additional component to recognize promotion and grade increments she missed out on. Some sort of formal recognition. I think the incoming management will see fit to sign off on it, under the circumstances.”
“I thought we already had?”
“No. In order to make it look good we bypassed the usual escrow arrangements. Everyone except you, me, and Persephone can swear under oath and compulsion that she’s a disgraced traitor. And Persephone doesn’t count.”
“So the Board is insulated. For how long?”
“We haven’t passed the final go/no-go gate yet. Our candidate is still in the Tower and Iris is still on the ‘wanted’ list. If you tell me to, I can still stop it in its tracks with a single phone call—until tomorrow morning.”
“All right. And in practical terms, how likely is she to get through? What about the Ring of Steel? Might the police spot her going in?”
“Oddly enough, it turns out that we didn’t have an up-to-date photograph of her on file that’s suitable for biometric extraction. And therefore neither do they.”
Womack nods. With no biometrics on file, the police camera network around the City won’t be able to automatically identify Iris Carpenter—or the Mandate, for that matter. The credit card Iris is using is a prepaid disposable card purchased overseas by a foreign tourist, and her phone is sterile. Iris’s tradecraft is about as good as can be expected, and she’s in her home city. The only way she’s going to get picked up is if she’s run over by a cycle courier or has the terminal bad luck to be spotted by one of the Met’s handful of super-recognizers—who will be working from a blurry ten-year-old picture if Persephone and the SA have done their job properly. “So tell me what happens next?”
“It’s going to go down like this…”
* * *
“We serve an old man in a dry season, a lighthouse keeper in the desert sun…”
Iris moves among the tourists like a fish swimming with her school, humming lyrics under her breath in time with the tune playing on her iPod.
After her meeting with Dr. Armstrong the night before she did as she was bid: checked into a hotel, ate dinner, slept, showered, broke her fast, and checked out. But then she had a morning at liberty before her meeting, and time to fill. When she couldn’t work out how to put music on her locked-down and paranoid phone, she went into an Apple store and took a certain malicious delight in the purchase of an iPod touch, some headphones, and a gift card that she used to buy back the sounds of her teenage years. Misuse of funds—fuck ’em, they can dock my pay. It enabled her to combine an acoustic nostalgia trip (there was no music in Camp Sunshine) with tradecraft cover: no sane agent would render themselves situationally unaware by screwing in the earphones and grooving to The Sisters of Mercy, so that was exactly what Iris chose to do.
“… Dreamers of sleepers and white treason, we dream of rain and the history of the gun.” And as the queue shuffles forward past the ticket desk she pays for admission and a tour guide, thinking of lighthouses and what it means to have nothing to lose.
Not wanting to stand out, she takes an hour to make her way around some of the historical exhibits—not including the Crown Jewels: the queue is out the door and halfway to Tower Gateway station—before drifting towards the café. She took the precaution of withdrawing a bundle of cash so now she’s able to pay for coffee and a croissant without leaving a transaction trail. She sips at her drink slowly, mentally revisiting her plans for the next couple of hours. After that, who knows? The SA implied that after doing her bit she should go to ground and await further orders. Which is all well and good, but it could be days before anything happens. It occurs to her that she quite fancies the idea of a spa treatment, and resolves to go in search of one this afternoon, assuming she survives.
Time slips slowly away until Iris’s coffee is a memory of bitterness dusted with cocoa, nothing left save a rim of scum adhering to the inside of an empty cup. She flicks pastry crumbs from her lap and stands, slightly creaky but as ready as she’ll ever be. A raven caws somewhere outside, baristas chatter behind the bar—the café seems to have hit a slow patch—and sunlight glints off the damp cobblestones beyond the doorway. Which, she reminds herself, she is allowed to walk through without heed for locks or wards.
On her way to the Beauchamp Tower Iris passes the site of the former firing range used by the Fusiliers during both world wars. They executed spies and traitors by firing squad, she remembers, and dips her chin in passing, feeling a momentary frisson of connectedness to those long-dead men. But she’s no longer a spy, she reminds herself, having taken a very long leave of absence from the Laundry’s org chart, and treason is a movable feast, as Seneca, or maybe John Harington, observed.
If she gets through this, she’ll treat herself to a spa session and a pedicure, she decides. And once the situation stabilizes she’ll move heaven and earth to find out where her daughter’s gone to ground. She doesn’t blame Jonquil for not visiting her in prison (the girl’s scatty but not that stupid), but once there’s no more reason to hide …
It’s not just her own life that she sacrificed on the altar of operational necessity, and for that she feels truly guilty.
The entrance to the Beauchamp Tower is coned off from the areas open to the public, and a discreet sign on the door says NO ADMITTANCE—PASSHOLDERS ONLY. Iris straightens her back and palms the identity card from the SA’s envelope. Her fingertips pric
kle as she touches it, and a moment later her scalp itches and she shivers violently as she crosses an invisible line just outside the threshold. Then she opens the vestibule door.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
The guard behind the transom smiles politely—he probably gets the odd tourist blundering in every day, it’s easy enough to take a wrong turning—but he’s clearly an old screw and his scrutiny isn’t remotely casual. Nor are the locks on the door at the other side of the guardroom. She smiles right back. “Iris Carpenter, from Q-Division. I’m here to interview the inmate. Following up on Dr. Armstrong’s visit a week ago.”
“I don’t think so,” says the guard, glancing at the computer screen on his desk, “no visitors expect—” Iris zaps him with the SA’s “little extra something.” It came preloaded on the company phone, a gadget that she still periodically boggles at—phones have come a long way, while she was in prison—and she holds the tiny tablet screen-out towards the man and he instinctively looks at it and then he slumps forward across the tabletop, sending his in-tray skidding. Iris intercepts it before it can shed its load—a bizarre mix of papers and what appear to be hearing implant transducers—then checks on the guard. He’s still breathing, but he’s deeply unconscious. She loosens his collar and tie, then fumbles for the ward he’s wearing on a chain—standard issue, heavy duty—and takes it for herself. (Not that she expects the prisoner to try and take her, but there’s always an element of risk.) Finally, she rummages along his belt for the inevitable keychain and adds it to her collection.
Two minutes have passed by the time Iris works out which key to use in which lock on the inner door. She takes a deep breath, holds her phone up, and pulls the door open.
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