The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  “Hey, you—” The other screw slurs oddly as he collapses. Iris steps over him. There’s another door ahead on the left and she opens it.

  “Why, hello!” The man-shaped thing in the armchair beams at her as he raises his teacup. “I was just wondering where you’d got to. Would you care for refreshments?”

  “My Lord.” Iris goes to her knees creakily, then bends low, as low as a fifty-three-year-old can manage. “It is an honor to serve you.”

  “I suppose so, but there’s no reason to stand on ceremony here, what? Get up, get up, have a seat. Do you take milk in your tea? Sugar?”

  Standing up takes far longer for Iris than prostrating herself, and she catches her breath before replying. “Whatever you think suitable, my Lord.”

  Her Lord appears to be in remarkably good spirits considering his circumstances, jovial and at ease with himself, but Iris is not misled. He is a mercurial being, capable of flashing from cheerful to icily furious and vengeful in a second at a perceived slight—or even on impulse, should he become bored. “I think you take your tea white, no sugar,” he announces, and, picking up the teapot, pours her a cup accordingly.

  “Thank you, my Lord,” Iris says, careful not to spill a drop as she accepts the beverage and takes a seat in the other chair. He is eerily correct: when she drinks tea, this is exactly how she takes it. “I believe we will be free of interruptions for at least ten minutes.”

  “Jolly good! So all is well with the world, I take it?”

  “I … couldn’t say, my Lord. I’ve been out of touch for quite a long time.”

  “As you will. That’s an interesting new geas you’re under; I assume your presence means that Dr. Armstrong is amenable to proceeding?”

  Iris nods, not trusting herself to speak. She sips her tea for cover; it’s really very good, a perfect brew.

  The prisoner picks up his cup and sips from it thoughtfully. “Would you like me to release you from your oath?”

  Iris looks at him evenly. “As you will.”

  Her Lord smiles. “Then I shall leave the geas in place; it suits you, you know, and it’s not as if it will make any difference. Time is short, I take it?”

  Iris nods. “Dr. Armstrong told me to tell you that, ah, the party is to be held on Saturday at the usual venue.”

  “I see.” He puts his cup down. “Then time is short, too short for a by-election. Hmm. So it will be necessary to join the government by the nonparliamentary route. Hmm again.”

  “The nonparliamentary route, my Lord?”

  He smiles again, sunlight flashing on teeth like wavetops. “The Prime Minister may appoint a nonparliamentarian to the cabinet, but by convention ministers must be members of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. So I will not only have to persuade him of the pressing need for an interim appointment, but then obtain the Royal Assent for my elevation without waiting for the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Although as that’s due to be announced next month I imagine an appointment could be expedited? A dukedom will do at a pinch…”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  He chuckles at Iris’s use of the honorific. “Not yet, Daughter, not yet.” Then the smile fades. “How am I to proceed?”

  “Do you have any luggage?” He shakes his head. “Then we can leave as soon as you’re ready.”

  The prisoner looks at her, and then through her, and for a moment Iris feels that her body has turned to glass beneath the thunderous scrutiny of a godlike gaze—“Ah, I see. Carry on then.”

  “Thank you, my Lord.” Iris stands, a little shakily, waits for the prisoner to also rise, then walks along the short corridor. The door has swung to in front of her. She unlocks her phone, turns it so that the rear camera faces the door, and brings up the standard OFCUT countermeasures app. The ward appears in the middle of the door, limned in false-color balefire. Iris presents the shiny new warrant card from the SA’s briefing package. “Attention. By the power vested in me under my oath of office, I deactivate this ward.” Her Enochian is very rusty, but she manages not to stumble over the words. There’s a brief flare of light and a crackle as the ward fades away. “The way is now open,” she says over her shoulder, trying not to think too hard about what she’s just done.

  If nothing else, she has just confirmed the wisdom of locking her up and throwing away the key—at least, to anyone not cleared for CONSTITUENCY, the honeypot operation under which she had established and run a chapter of the Cult of the Black Pharaoh. But looming above and beyond that are the frightening implications of the SA’s gambit—and of the depthless pit of despair that must have motivated the Board of Directors to approve it.

  Above my pay grade, Iris tells herself nervously, as she opens the front door and leads her Lord blinking into the daylight.

  * * *

  Thursday evening finds Mhari working overtime with the tiger team monitoring Schiller’s apartment in Docklands.

  Things have changed quite a bit in the weeks since Persephone and Johnny McTavish first rented the apartment and subsequently parked Bob in it in the wake of the snatch attempt. Johnny has been spending a lot of time there, as has Mhari. The living room is now an operations room, staffed by former tech ops people who Continuity Ops have vetted, cleared, and recruited. Johnny is managing the team, who keep the apartment two floors below the safe house under 24×7 observation. The kitchen is stocked with microwave meals and coffee, the office desks in the living room support a comprehensive array of surveillance receivers and loggers, and go-bags sit in the hallway awaiting the mission to black-bag Schiller’s residence.

  Working out how to enter Schiller’s flat without falling foul of the elaborate alarm system has been tiresome and problematic. For one thing, there’s a one-floor air gap between occupied apartments, with empty but alarm-covered rooms in the way. For another, the flats are shielded against electromagnetic leakage, with their own cellular picocells and secure internet landlines to carry the traffic. The ops team have brought a StingRay to the party but it’s remained stubbornly silent apart from logging all the team members’ own phones. Schiller’s staff have some top-notch InfoSec Discipline. GP Security employees sweep for electronic bugs daily, there’s a white-noise generator coupled to every window frame to defeat laser microphones, and whoever configured their internet firewall is frustratingly competent.

  If Johnny was still able to call on GCHQ’s resources via Q-Division’s liaison desk, they could doubtless find a zero-day that would get through the cordon downstairs, but under the circumstances that option is off the menu. It’s also targeting a state-level adversary—a private-sector contractor that works for the Laundry’s American equivalent agency. So Johnny is already feeling a little defensive when Mhari beckons him into the second bedroom—repurposed as a break room by the surveillance team—and sits him down for a head-to-head.

  “It’s not goin’ well, love.” He shakes his head. “The StingRay’s getting nothing—Schiller’s people turn off their mobile phones when they go inside. Roz thinks ’e’s got ’em all using some kind of encrypted voice-over-IP app on the suite Wi-Fi, which is stitched up like a kipper.” Roz is the team’s white-hat hacker. “She cracked the Wi-Fi password but says they’re just using it for a VPN. She also figures they’ve got a bunch of intrusion detection sniffers. Snooping on them is like blind pogoing in a minefield, she says.”

  “Well, bum.” Mhari picks up a can of caffeine-free Coke from the cooler on the dressing table and plants herself on the side of the bed. “How are the mikes coming along?”

  “Gazza’s done good.” Johnny scratches his head. “’E made a few false starts with the drill but ’e finally found a stud wall downstairs yesterday and drove three fiber runs through it.” The empty flat below the safe house is a major obstacle: the non-load-bearing internal walls are deliberately offset from the floors above and below, so that attempts to run a wire or fiber-optic cable straight down through the ceiling will be glaringly obvious. “One came out in the bog, one’s in the ki
tchen, but the third—’e thinks ’e got the living room, but it’s not over the conference table.”

  “Is there any take?” Mhari sips at her Coke. She’s tired and irritable, having spent the day holed up in a cheap hotel room with noisy neighbors, and has come here to take over the night shift.

  Johnny smiles crookedly. “I was just gettin’ to that.” Mhari resists the urge to strangle him, but flashes him a little fang. The smile vanishes. “Gazza’s got us a passive optical pickup embedded about half a millimeter inside a ceiling tile diagonally across the room from the conference table, just over the sofa. Optics are really hazy but we can see when someone’s sitting there—not who, though. The audio is better: we can bounce an infrared laser beam down the fiber and amplify the take, so there’s no EM noise for their bug sniffer to pick up. Only trouble is, nobody’s been in there during the daytime ’cept the agency cleaners, so there’s no intel—”

  “Wait. Agency cleaners.” Mhari cocks her head to one side. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Johnny whistles quietly between his teeth. “Risky, love, very risky.”

  “Who logged them?” Mhari persists.

  “I think Steve was on the morning shift…”

  Mhari puts her can down and stands up. “Let’s see how thoroughly he did his job.”

  Gary—the bugging tech—is working at the desk with the rack of recording gear; Roz the pen tester is getting ready to leave, leaving Mhari and Johnny to take care of the evening handoff. Mhari goes over to the other desk, where there’s a PC running case management software developed for the police, who do a lot more covert surveillance operations than an agency usually more busy suppressing things with the wrong number of dimensions, never mind limbs. “Let’s see.” She logs on and pokes around for a bit. “Okay, user SteveG reports from today, 1124 hours, two POI entered target lobby. Hmm. Okay, that gives us a time window to pull the CCTV and the front desk register.” Mhari pokes around some more. “Yes, they look like contract cleaning staff.” She glances at Johnny. “Can you nip down to the front desk and ask who they are?”

  Johnny raises an eyebrow. “You want me to flash it around…?”

  “You’ve got a warrant card for now, use it while it’s fresh.”

  Johnny raises a lazy finger to his forehead. “On it.” The source of occult authority that binds the Continuity Ops warrant cards gives them some of the mind-warping mojo of the dissolved agency’s ID, and Johnny is on the inside. He heads for the door as Mhari sits down to trawl through the past day’s event log.

  She’s just reached the record of the cleaners leaving—they took just under two hours—when Gary clears his throat. “Ms. Murphy?” he calls, half-turning in his chair. “Got something.”

  “What—” Mhari is across the room so fast he barely has time to flinch. The spare pair of headphones he’s offering her falls from his fingers; she catches them. “Yes?”

  “I’m putting this on a sixty-second delay.” Gary recovers and scrubs back through the digital recording. “I think you’ll find this interesting.”

  Mhari listens. The sound from the omnidirectional passive mike is muffled to begin with, and it picks up every sound in the room, from the white noise of the air conditioning to the thud of the bedroom door and the shuffle of feet on carpet. Furthermore, people in conversation use their bodies and their faces as much as their words. Gradually she begins to decode the discourse. “Hosts will be ready—two days—next party primary—yes, Grove and the, the Prime—induction. I’ll supervise—Back here. Invite them—”

  Gary is tormenting the speech transcription software on the laptop next to the desktop with the audio capture card. “That’s Schiller,” he says quietly. “What are hosts?”

  Mhari has read the GOD GAME BLACK report. “Keyword clearance. Keep listening for more, it’s important. Also names and dates.”

  She stands up, elated. Not that she expects Schiller to be so indiscreet as to twirl his nonexistent mustache and tell one of his minions, we shall enact our dastardly scheme to take over the Prime Minister’s brain upon the hour of midnight, hah hah!—But just picking up the terms host and next party in the same conversation is a big win. It’s something concrete, and she already knows from other sources that Schiller’s next big knees-up at Nether Stowe House is due this Saturday night.

  If Johnny can unearth the personal details of the cleaners who are servicing Schiller’s apartment, and Mhari can confirm that Schiller will be running the party in person, then the outline of a plan for Target Three is beginning to come into focus.

  * * *

  They meet back in the same bar on Euston Road at three o’clock in the afternoon. It’s midway between the lunchtime rush and the afterwork crush; this time Iris has no problem finding a padded bench seat with a view of the doorways via the big mirrors behind the bar. She orders a pot of tea and a burger. It’s not exactly a gastronomic extravaganza but it’s available and she’s hungry and it gives her an excuse for occupying a booth by herself. And the tea keeps her from drinking anything stronger, because she has a twitchy feeling that if she gets started now she won’t stop until the world goes away.

  She’s drunk most of her tea and is working unenthusiastically on the burger when a presence appears on the seat opposite her. Irritated, she keeps on masticating regardless until he has finished shedding his overcoat and clears his throat. “Yes?” she says.

  “How did it go?”

  “You know how it went or you wouldn’t be here.” She puts her fork down. (Iris is too jealous of her remaining dignity to eat with her fingers if she can avoid it.) “He accepted your offer.”

  “Good, I think.” To his credit, Dr. Armstrong looks slightly queasy.

  “It’s too late to back out now.” Iris picks up her fork again and goes to work on her chips. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Riding a tiger.” Dr. Armstrong has brought a pint of beer to the table; now he takes a mouthful. “Mmm. The question is whether the tiger prefers to eat the monkey on his back or the juicy, fat buffalo in front of him. Better eating on the buffalo. I think.”

  Iris finishes her burger in silence before moving on to the next question. “So what do you have for me to do now?”

  “Liaison work: consider yourself his personal assistant for the time being. It’s not as if we have a management role for you right now anyway. Just be on hand in case he wants something arranged; call on me if you need agency resources for it, but bear in mind we’re extremely limited right now.” Reaching under his overcoat, the SA pulls out a travel document organizer that bulges slightly. “We have an unallocated safe house—it’s out in SW17, I’m afraid—and I took the liberty of having it set up for you. Because you aren’t anywhere on our org chart you’re safe from the current adversarial situation, and we’ve taken steps to ensure that you won’t be reported as an absconder. Six months private lease, furnished, security system certificated to level three, no strings attached. Council tax paid up until November, utility bills chargeable to an offshore account where the paper trail vanishes. Here are the particulars and the front door keys. The rest of the paperwork is on the kitchen table.” He pauses.

  “What paperwork?” Her expression is stony.

  “I took some liberties. Some of us remember the good work you’ve done: funds equivalent to your payroll continued to be deposited while you were away and you have, hmm, a not inconsiderable bank balance awaiting you. Once the agency is reconstituted—if we are successful—I checked your personal progression profile and, if you choose to take the requisite courses, we can bump you four grades up from where you left off within a year. Assuming you wish to resume your employment.”

  “Assuming I don’t choose permanent deactivation. And assuming there’s an agency to come back to.”

  “If there isn’t, we’ll all be dead. Or worse.” They sit in silence for a couple of minutes.

  “There will be obstacles to me returning,” she says at last.
/>   “Which ones?”

  “You know perfectly well—” She stops dead and squints at him, red-eyed, then takes a deep breath. “Dr. Angleton, for one, and his gofer Bob, for another. They think I—” She stops again. “What?”

  “I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you.” Dr. Armstrong glances down at the table. “Angleton’s dead. Nothing to do with your—I mean, it was an entirely different threat situation. There were other changes, while you were away.”

  “Other changes.” Iris frowns. “Such as?”

  “Mr. Howard is James’s successor.” At her double take, Armstrong adds, “Not only in post but in practice—he’s coming along very nicely.” While she’s absorbing this, he continues: “Andy Newstrom, Doris Greene, Judith Carroll, and a bunch of others died during an incursion last year. Gerry Lockhart is suspended—arrested, in prison on remand awaiting trial—following events in Leeds. Most of our senior personnel—Mahogany Row—are currently avoiding spurious arrest warrants arranged by the enemy. Dr. O’Brien, Bob’s other half, is our newest Auditor. Right before we came under attack we were integrating new and unexpected add-ons on the org chart: vampires and elves and other strange creatures out of legend. Dragons, even. And that’s barely scratching the surface.”

  Iris snorts dismissively. “Next you’ll be telling me werewolves are real.”

  “No, of course”—he shakes his head—“that is to say, I really hope not.” For a moment he almost musters up a smile, but it slips away. “But we’re currently running Continuity Operations in the absence of a mandate from Parliament. We’re very short-staffed. The enemy attacked us from the top down, very suddenly, while operations were already disrupted by the crisis in Yorkshire. If a sister agency in the United States hadn’t tried to warn us we might have missed it completely. First they destroyed our legal standing with the rest of the Civil Service by getting the PM and the Cabinet Secretary to announce our dissolution, then they attacked our budget via the Treasury—not just cutting off our funding overtly, but aiming the Serious Fraud Office anti–money laundering teams at our fallback resources. They generated spurious crime reports targeting individual members of Mahogany Row, starting with those who were already known to them and then adding names from the files they obtained when their subcontractors went into our recently vacated offices. They already did this once, in the United States—they used the same protocol against the Comstock Office, and only the fact that a very brave man leaked their transcripts to us has enabled us to keep ahead of the ball.”