The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  For a moment I’m afraid the desk sergeant is going to succumb to my middle-aged invisibility field, but then his roving eyeballs land on my warrant card and his pupils dilate slightly as it snags the surface of his mind. “Yes, ma’am.” He doesn’t exactly snap to attention – his attitude is more like one of suppressed annoyance at having his routine interrupted by the urgent need to perform hand-holding duties for a senior officer who ought to know better – but suddenly he’s all over the switchboard. “DCI Sullivan, please: a Dr. O’Brien is waiting for you… Where?… I’ll send her over right away, ma’am.” He looks back at me. “She’s in the custody suite, ma’am. The special one. Is that where you’re expecting to find her?”

  I nod. “Which way is it?”

  He grabs a constable who is hurrying past: “Julie, would you be a dear and show the superintendent here to the special custody suite? DCI Sullivan is waiting on her.”

  Julie, suffering the be-a-dear in professional silence, leads me through the badger’s sett that is the back side of the police station – scuffed white paint, flickering overhead tubes, and a pervasive smell of stale coffee – and then down a concrete stairwell to a heavy steel door overlooked by half a dozen cameras in armored enclosures. “This is the old custody suite, ma’am. The main one’s on the other side of the building – we were using this to store the riot kit until they repurposed it for the differently empowered three months ago. Have they filled you in on that? The special handling requirements?”

  “I’m here to see Jo Sullivan about it,” I reassure her. “She’ll fill me in.”

  “Great. May I go? I was on my way to a briefing when —”

  “Go on” – pause – “and thanks,” I call after her rapidly receding back. Then I turn to the heavy steel door, the like of which one normally only finds in bank vaults and other places that store stuff that really shouldn’t be allowed to escape. There is a very prosaic white plastic doorbell stapled inexpertly to the wall next to it. I push the button.

  A minute later, there is a squeal of inadequately lubricated gears as the door slides open a crack. “Dominique? Good to see you again.”

  I cross the threshold and shake hands with Jo. (The threshold is about ten centimeters thick and cross-hatched with yellow stripes and warning stickers showing the grisly things that will happen to you if you happen to be standing in the doorway when the powered door closes.) “So this is the superhero lock-up?”

  “Yeah. One of them.” Jo takes a step backwards and gestures me in. As I follow her the huge vault-type door whines shut behind me. It closes a lot more smoothly than it opens: there’s a thunk of steel bolts sliding home, then I notice the background hum of the air conditioners. “The interview suites are over there, that corridor leads to three cells, that one leads to Facilities, staff restrooms, custody officer’s room, and a ready room. They’re only Cat-B secure – we can’t store über-villains here – but it’s the best we can do this close to the center of town, at least until the CrossRail TBMs come available to dig the deep London lock-up they’ve been talking about. How about a coffee while we discuss your request?”

  Uh-oh. “A coffee would be great, thanks,” I say, and she leads me to the ready room. It does not escape my attention that the entire underground custody suite seems to be embedded in reinforced concrete and has its own air supply. “What is this, a former nuclear bunker?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what it used to be.” She switches on the battered kettle. “Most of the central London police stations built before 1970 have them. Anyone trying to use them for shelter probably didn’t stand a prayer, but they’d still be structurally sound after the rubble stopped bouncing, unlike most of the other buildings, and we’d have needed somewhere for the surviving officers to use as a station. The cells were to be used as dormitories and arms lockers.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t you have needed them as, well, cells?”

  Jo shakes her head. “Not after a nuclear war, Mo. Think martial law and firing squads.” She grabs two chipped mugs from the cupboard and sloshes coffee and milk into them. “Be glad it never happened.”

  I fear that we might yet end up going that way if we can’t get a handle on CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. I take my mug and sit down. “Has he coughed yet?”

  She’s a stand-and-pace type. “Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He’s absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We’re keeping him here because he’s not deemed a hazard to himself, but so far he’s confessed to assassinating Margaret Thatcher —”

  “But Maggie died of natural causes —”

  “Yes, exactly. He’s also confessed to conspiracy to rob the Bank of England, which is flat-out impossible because he was in custody right here at the time he says he did it. He’s delusional about other subjects as well. The duty psychiatrist spent some time assessing him yesterday and thinks he’s unfit to stand trial; he’s raving about conspiracies and Mad Scientists trying to take over the world and radio receivers in his head. We did some background legwork and found he was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic four years ago. Looks like he’d been off his meds for some time and was already going downhill fast – he was Sectioned twice in the past nine months – when he came down with an acute attack of superpower-itis.”

  “Oh dear.” I take a mouthful of coffee. It is, if anything, even worse than the hotel buffet brew. When my eyes uncross I take another gulp: the last thing I need is a caffeine headache. “Well, since I’ve come this far I suppose I ought to interview him anyway…”

  “You’ll be lucky to get anything out of him. Listen, I’ve talked to more than my fair share of paranoid schizophrenics over the years, and you get a handle on them after a while. Most of them are lovely people, they just can’t stop hearing things. And they get mood swings and medication side effects and obsessive-compulsive tics. Spratt’s different. His powers mean he expresses his delusions, sometimes violently, on whoever’s around him. And something about him doesn’t feel right. If I was a shrink, I’d say he’s under the influence of something else – but the duty doc took bloods and he’s clean.”

  “So what you’re saying is, you don’t expect me to get anything out of him?”

  “Yes. Also, about that: you know we’re going to have to do the rules of evidence tap dance and haul the duty solicitor in if Laughing Boy so much as looks like he wants representation?”

  “Oh hell.” I take another mouthful. “Well, my cover can’t get any more blown than it is already, and I’m not held to the same rules of evidence as —”

  “Yes, you are!” Jo’s expression is fierce: “As long as you’re in this nick, you’re on my turf, and we play by the rules here. No spook head-games permitted. Jack’s going down one way or the other: maybe he’ll pull a long stretch in prison, but more likely he’s due to check in for the Broadmoor rest cure. Where he ends up is for the judge and the psychiatrists to figure out, and if your people really want to take him off my hands, that’s another option, but as long as he’s in my custody I am not going to permit you to waltz in and jeopardize his conviction —”

  I raise my hands: “I surrender.”

  “— By messing up his inter— Okay. Sorry, Mo, didn’t mean to blow up at you. I’ve been butting heads with too damn many cowboys and would-be vigilantes recently. Not to mention the tabloid hang ’em and flog ’em brigade and a steady stream of superhero-obsessed liqui-bullshit raining down from the top of the pyramid. The Home Office are screaming, and whenever they get a bee in their bonnet we all get stung sooner or later.” She begins to calm down and sips on her coffee, then pulls a face. “This is disgusting.”

  “Really? I’d never have guessed.” I push my mug away. “I just want to run some names past him.”

  “What names?”

  “Something I found in a box of cereal. Sorry, Jo, I won’t know for sure unless he bites. And, um, national security. Suppose I say I want to rule him out of the Thatcher assassination enquiry that doesn’t offic
ially exist?”

  She shakes her head. “That’s just peachy. Look, I’m pretty sure you won’t get anything out of him, but if you insist, I’ll set you up. Interview Room 2, ten minutes’ time, okay?”

  I nod. “Okay.”

  She disappears, and I finish my vile coffee. (The third mouthful stuns my taste buds enough to let the rest slip down without too much pain.) I hope this isn’t going to turn out to be a wild goose chase…

  Twenty minutes later a placid-looking custody sergeant fetches me from the break room (where I have forced down a second mug of the stuff festering in the bottom of the filter machine jug) and escorts me to Interview Room 2. “The Chief’s already in there with your customer, ma’am. He’s a little excitable so we don’t want to leave him alone.”

  “Excitable?”

  “Positively bouncing off the walls and ceiling.”

  The interview rooms in the superhero lock-up are as nonstandard as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) permits. For one thing, there are two doors – one opening onto the cell block, the other into the office area. For another thing, the room is split in two by a giant sheet of extremely thick toughened glass. Someone has etched a gigantic containment ward into the glass and grounded the hell out of it, just in case. Finally, there’s a CCTV camera pointed at the wall. It’s all admissible evidence, and if a villain with hitherto-unplumbed occult superpowers does something terminally stupid, it might save the lives of the next interview team.

  On our side of the glass wall, we’ve got chairs and a desk that supports a DVD recording machine, a box of disks, and sealable envelopes to stash the confessions in. On his side of the wall, Strip Jack Spratt has got five thoroughly padded surfaces – walls, ceiling, floor, even the door is padded – and I’m pretty sure if they had transparent padding for bulletproof glass, they’d have added it to the window. There are wards stenciled on the padding and on every available non-transparent surface. Someone is really worried about stray thaum currents in there.

  And then there’s Strip Jack Spratt himself.

  “Have a seat —” Jo winces in time to a meaty thud. “I wish he’d stop doing that.”

  Strip Jack Spratt is totally naked. It’s impossible to ignore: the thud was the noise he made plastering himself across the glass wall, upside down. He’s right in front of us with one foot in contact with the ceiling and his arms spread wide across the glass in best Spiderman tradition, which means his pasty-skinned gut bucket and equally pallid wedding tackle are approximately at eye level. He’s about fifty, BMI just on the high side of clinically obese, totally bald and hairless, and he has eyes like red-rimmed piss-holes in the snow. Also, he’s gurning like a mad clown.

  “When Sergeant Jackson said he was bouncing off the walls and ceiling, I didn’t realize he was speaking literally.”

  “Brian’s very literal,” says Josephine. “Hey, there he goes again.”

  Spratt, who has been mouthing at us like a catfish, arches his back in an implausible belly-wobbling backflip, then careens across the room and bounces off the rear wall, tumbles to the floor, then falls upwards until his back is plastered to the ceiling. He screams, proving that the glass isn’t impervious to sound. It’s not a scream of pain: more like a warbling war cry. Or glossolalia.

  “Better start recording,” I say. “This looks messy.”

  “If you insist.” Jo pushes a button on the recording deck’s panel. “Interview requested by Dr. Dominique O’Brien, Security Service, with Chief Inspector Sullivan present, zero nine forty-six…” She reels off the date and other mandatory notices, then raises her voice to read Spratt his rights under questioning. Spratt ignores her throughout. “All right, Dr. O’Brien, he’s all yours.”

  Where to begin? “Good morning, Jack,” I try.

  He ignores me, other than to cease his gurgling scream and fall silent.

  “Jack, I want to ask you some questions.”

  He ignores me. Lying on the ceiling, perfectly recumbent, he looks ready to compete at Ignoring Intelligence Officers for Britain in the Olympics.

  “Jack, you’re not helping yourself.”

  Jo spares me a sidelong, pitying look. Spratt continues to practice Ignoring Intelligence Officers.

  I sigh. Okay, he won’t listen to me. How about…? I pick up my violin case and plant it on the table. No response. I unlatch the case, open the lid, and remove the bow. Then I pick up Lecter.

  Sullivan grabs my left arm. “Doctor, I hope you’re not planning to —”

  “No, I’m not. I’d just like to play him a straight melody, with no extras: see if it gets his attention. Look at the shielding around him, he’s safe from anything I can do short of taking a sledgehammer to the window. Is that permissible?”

  She gives me a hard look. “Music only.”

  “If I had a practice violin, I’d use it instead of this one,” I assure her. “This one’s valuable. May I?”

  Spratt closes his eyes. After a few seconds he begins to snore. We’ll see about that, someone thinks – I’m not sure whether it’s Lecter or me.

  I push my chair back, stand up, and begin to play the same improvisation on “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” that I took him down with the other day, minus the eerie harmonics from the Hilbert-space pickups. He takes it for about three seconds. Then he stops ignoring me.

  The violent flailing is boring. The bouncing off the walls, floor, ceiling, and window like a self-propelled middle-aged sex doll is mildly disturbing. But then he thumps into the glass face-first less than a meter away from me, so hard that his nose begins to bleed, a snarl of existential hatred plastered across his face. “Motherfucker!” he screams. “Bitch fuck cunt piss-flaps sicksicksick eat my shit!”

  Oh goody, we have contact. Even if it’s bringing out his Tourette’s. I raise the bow. “Would you like me to play something else?” I ask.

  Jo, I notice, is leaning back very slightly, face set in a deadpan mask of concentration.

  “No!” he snaps petulantly. “Kill it kill it kill it with fire!”

  “Kill what?” I ask.

  “It! It! It! It! It!” He points at me. After a moment I realize he’s trying to indicate the violin.

  “Why should I?”

  “He wants it! He does! The King in Yellow! The Professor in Emerald! The Gambling Doctor! He put the computer in my brain that says to do what he wants and he wants it and he’ll have it and dance to the ditty that destroys the world! The Queen in Red and the King in Yellow! Ia! Ia! Hurts, it hurts!” He clutches his head: “Worst headache ever!”

  Well, fuck. I put my violin down and make eye contact with Jo, then give a tiny shake of the head: she nods. Useless. Computers-in-brains aside, he’s hopelessly contaminated with Lovecraft. One last try. “Who is the professor?” I ask. “Are you talking about Freudstein?”

  Spratt stops ranting and looks at me. “What?” he asks, abruptly lucid. “Head aches —”

  “Are you talking about Professor Freudstein?” I ask.

  An expression of abject terror crosses his face. “Not allowed! Computer says No! Hurts!”

  “What’s not allowed?”

  “Not allowed! Pain!”

  “Are you forbidden to talk about Professor Freudstein?” I ask, slowly and clearly.

  “No —” Spratt wails, then abruptly drops to the floor like a puppet whose strings have been cut. There is nothing theatrical or contrived about it: I’ve seen sacks of potatoes with more muscular control. So, by her reaction, has Jo: she spares me a horrified glance, swears, and is out the door so fast she knocks her chair halfway across the room. I stay just long enough to put Lecter back in his case and am about to hurry after Jo and find out where they keep the emergency resuscitation kit when I glance back at Spratt.

  He’s lying on his back with his feet against the glass, legs slightly spread and one arm twisted behind his back. His left cheek is twitching, the heel of his left foot banging on the floor: but to all appearances, my chief suspect has just suffer
ed a massive stroke.

  I do not get to leave the police station for some time. I am, as they say, unavoidably detained. Not as unavoidably as the late Mr. Spratt, who is pronounced dead at the scene by the on-call doctor. But DCI Sullivan isn’t going to let me escape until she’s taken me aside for a very free and frank exchange of opinions.

  “Spill it,” she demands, leaning in my face.

  “I was testing a hypothesis.” I hunch my shoulders. I feel dreadful: too exposed, in need of some safe space to retreat into while I get my head centered again. Did I kill Spratt? No, of course not. But I asked him the fatal question… “Did you hear about the Bank of England case?” I ask, more to distract myself than to inform Jo.

  “The what?” The penny drops, instantly.

  “Okay, so they’re locking the lid down tight on it.” That makes this easier. “Listen, Jack may not have been as out-of-it as your shrink thought. While he was busy doing his thing with the Mayor, somebody did something really bad that you haven’t been told about and don’t want to stick your nose in.”

  “Shit. That’s not just a major crime, that’s the kind that…”

  “Yes, that.” We share a moment’s conspiratorial silence. “Think in terms of the Northern Bank robbery and you’ll be on the right track. You’ll hear about it after they’ve completed the emergency damage control. Until then, keep your trap shut.”

  “Jesus wept.” She’s gone all clipped and stiff-upper-lip on me: utterly aghast. Good, she’s got the message.

  Let me give you a brief rundown: the Northern Bank Robbery of 2004 was the biggest bank robbery in Northern Irish history. Hell, it was one of the biggest bank robberies anywhere, ever. The robbers, using an MO that is eerily familiar to anyone who had dealings with the happy fun guys from the Provisional IRA back in the bad old days, took two bank managers’ families hostage to guarantee their cooperation, then hit the bank’s cash center. They were spectacularly successful and got away with a truckload of banknotes. In fact they were too successful. Northern Bank is an issuing bank – one of the four banks licensed by the Bank of England to print Northern Irish currency. Northern Ireland isn’t very large: the robbers stole nearly a tenth of all the banknotes that institution had in circulation. In fact, they stole so much that the bank issued a total currency recall, printed new currency, and hastily took the old ones out of circulation, thereby turning the entire truckload of stolen lucre into high-quality toilet paper (because it’s just a little bit difficult to launder 10 percent of an entire currency in a couple of months).