“Yep.”
“So why aren’t the OPA crawling all over this town right now?”
“Because,” Johnny says patiently, “they can’t. Schiller’s keeping them out. Paddy lives here; he’s their only eyes and ears right now.”
“Right.” I think for a moment. “Then we need to contact him because he’s probably our only way of getting a message out right now. Schiller’s big mega-church is in Colorado Springs, and he’s starting whatever it is at three this afternoon. At least that’s what the ads on cable TV say. I think he’s moving to some kind of endgame, and opening a gate is part of it. So here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to go and find Patrick and go to ground with him.” Johnny is looking at me oddly, but I push on: “You and I”—I turn to Persephone—“are going to drive down to Palmer Lake and look around. Bet it’s some kind of major ceremony—if they’re doing what I think they’re doing—”
“They’ll need lots of warm meat. Understood.” She glances at Johnny, then nods. “They’ll be processing the flock at the mega-church. What do you want to do about it, Mr. Howard?”
I take a mouthful of the foul wake-up juice. “I think we should confirm what’s going on, then relay to Johnny, who’s going to tell Patrick to tell his handler what the epicenter is.” Johnny nods slowly but holds his counsel. “Then we’re going to go visit the church. It’d be a good idea to confirm the picture before we set the Nazgûl on them. Plus, they may be running the abattoir some distance from the buffet. In which case we may be able to rescue a few folks.” I swallow again, my throat abruptly dry. “And then I’m going to take some holiday snaps.”
I HATE KILLING.
Most people seem to have this escapist James Bond vision of secret agents offing bad guys left, right, and center, then wisecracking about it. Or they think we’re some kind of Jack Bauer psychopath torturing the truth about the ticking bomb out of everyone in sight. In truth, killing is a very unusual part of the job and it leaves me feeling sick and depressed for months afterwards—and that’s when someone else is doing it.
I can count on my thumbs the number of people I have intentionally killed in my decade-plus of service. I’ve put down a lot of once-living humans whose bodies still moved but whose nervous systems were in service to alien nightmares, but that’s not the same. The zombies, like the two who tried to grab me back in the hotel, are not so terrible—you learn to live with the inevitability of it eventually—but the very idea of killing a thinking, laughing, loving human being makes me sick in my stomach and fills me with horror. And that’s when it’s a bad guy who’s got a knife at my throat or who is pointing a gun at me, and I can justify it to myself as self-defense. (Killing innocent bystanders is something I have nightmares about. Once, for a traumatic week, I thought I’d done so; it nearly broke me.)
Anyway, that’s why they send me on these missions. As my ex-boss Andy put it, “Would you rather we gave the job to someone who enjoyed it?”
It’s bad enough when I have to do smelly stuff that lands someone else in the shit. TL;DR version is, I hate killing, and I try to find any possible shadow of an excuse to avoid doing it. (And so does my wife.)
…Which is why it feels very peculiar, not to mention distressing, to be in this position.
Schiller’s ministry is clearly messing with very dangerous powers. That Bible alone would have been enough to justify shutting him down with extreme prejudice, and as for the rest—the brain parasites, the baby farm Persephone stumbled across, not to mention the Fimbulwinter weather and the Sleeper in the Pyramid—all of those are enough to justify bringing the hammer down hard.
I don’t like the term “collateral damage”; it trivializes agony and dismemberment, mourning and grief. (You try telling the bereaved survivors that you had to kill their family and friends to protect their freedom. See how you like what they say to you.) But if any situation justifies the use of extreme force, this comes close. If Schiller’s misguided attempt to wake the Gatekeeper (Is Schiller really so naive he believes that abomination is Jesus Christ?) succeeds, everyone in the world will pay the price. These things are not demons or gods: they’re ancient intelligences from other corners of the cosmos that are normally inaccessible and inhospitable to our kind. When they get into our world they are as inclined to mercy towards us as cats are towards mice. We make splendid toys for their amusement, until we break.
If Schiller is really trying to conduct a great summoning with the Apocalypse Codex as a reference manual, someone has to shut the gate down before he levers it wide enough to summon his master—a process which probably involves mass human sacrifice, because these nitwits are generally too theory-impaired to realize that if they want to make a nuclear explosion there are more efficient ways to do it than banging two lumps of highly enriched uranium together by hand. And unless the Seventh Cavalry—that would be the Nazgûl—make it over the hill in time, that duty devolves on me. Because I’m apprenticed to the Eater of Souls (and how’s that for a job description? Junior Assistant Under-Secretary For Eating Of Souls, Fourth Grade) and they made me sign for Pinky’s pocket consumer implementation of SCORPION STARE, the original basilisk gun in a box—so I guess from the outside I look like some kind of super-powerful government assassin.
While all the time I’m brokenly repeating inside, like an old-time cracked record, fuck me, I’ve drawn the hangman’s straw. Again.
TRY LOOKING AT IT FROM SOMEONE ELSE’S POINT OF VIEW:
Persephone drives slowly into the teeth of the twilight, peering suspiciously at the road from behind wipers that sweep across the windscreen with a rhythmic thud, shoveling the driving snow into the chilly night.
The liaison officer from External Assets slumps next to her in the passenger seat. His face is turned away. He could almost be sleeping, but occasionally he raises a hand to scratch alongside his nose or delivers some other sign of sentience. The other hand rests, palm down, on the small cardboard pizza box in his lap.
The weather is unnerving. Huge snowflakes, fingernail-sized, drift from a sky that dawn has barely brightened to the color of dull slate, warmed by a brassy tint that bespeaks more snow to come. There’s little wind and the flakes drop steadily, dulling the sound of traffic from outside the coupé and reducing visibility to a couple of hundred meters.
The municipality snowplows are out and the roads are gritted. Even so, the fresh snow is filling in tire tracks in front of her eyes. Denver gets snow and people hereabouts know how to drive in the stuff, but the sidewalks and trees are already blanketed thickly, and it’s getting heavier.
There’s a ramp onto the interstate, clogged with sluggish traffic shuffling south. It moves in fits and starts. She glances sideways at Howard again. A civil service chinless wonder, Johnny thought. Well, the chinless wonder in question broke out through a snatch squad and evaded capture as neatly as any field op in the Network. And the chinless wonder seems to harbor ideas about leading from the front, not dropping the people he thinks he’s responsible for in the sticky stuff. And he’s inclined to go for the throat when confronted with a fight/flight choice. All in all, he’s shaping up extremely positively as far as Persephone’s personnel review is concerned. But…holiday snaps? He’s joking, he’s mad, or he’s holding something back. And she knows which she’d put her money on.
Persephone checks her rearview again, then squints into the falling curtain of snow. A big rig looms up out of the haze on her right, stationary on the hard shoulder. Snow is already mounding up across its hood as she rolls past it in a wave of slush, maintaining a steady forty. A lunatic in an SUV is coming up too damned fast on the left, but at least he won’t be yacking on his cellphone on the way to work. “Mr. Howard. Is your phone getting a signal yet?”
Howard’s hand moves to his coat pocket. “Nope.” He stares at the iPhone for a while before sliding it away again. “Thaumometer’s still hot ahead of us, though.”
Persephone compares his announcement to her mental map, lurid gold
and yellow highlights gleaming like Midas’s curse, and finds that the spike of power that marks the portal is right where he said. “Check.”
She scans her rearview again. “About the target. Once Patrick notifies the Black Chamber, what do you think we should do?”
Her passenger cogitates for a few seconds. “That depends. If the Nazgûl tell us they’ll handle it—then, I think, at that point we should leave as fast as we can. Assuming we’re able to, of course. At that point, it’s their baby.”
“And if they don’t? Or if we can’t contact them?”
Howard sighs. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get—”
There are red-and-blue lights flashing up ahead. Another big rig has slid off the side of the road, and the highway patrol are directing traffic over to the left to pass it. She notices the way Howard tenses. “Do you have a plan, or were you going to improvise?” she asks.
“It depends on whether Schiller’s church event is where he’s opening the gate, or merely where he’s feeding it from,” he admits.
“They’re separate.” She purses her lips. Can’t he see that? Doesn’t he have the inner eye to observe the magic lighting up the horizon all around? Clearly not—and she doesn’t think he’s the type to go through life with eyes wide shut.
“Then it also depends on whether the Nazgûl are on the case. I figure I can shut down one or the other but not necessarily both, assuming they’re in separate places. If the Nazgûl can shut down the gate I can stop the sacrifices, or vice versa. Or—”
“You are not asking me to take one of them. Why is that?”
She keeps her eyes on the road ahead, but her fingers tighten on the wheel. Howard might notice and think she’s tense because of the snow, but he’d be wrong. Clearly Lockhart didn’t brief him fully: it’s almost as if he thinks he’s in charge here.
Howard is silent for a few seconds. Then: “I don’t think it’s fair to ask civilian contractors to do something that could get them killed in the line of duty.”
Civilian Contractors? Lockhart definitely left him in the dark, then, or maybe that part of her dossier was above Howard’s clearance level. But Persephone finds another aspect of Howard’s reply more interesting than his misconceptions about her and Johnny. “What has fairness got to do with it?”
Howard looks at her. She keeps her eyes on the road, but can half-feel his curiosity burning into the side of her face. “We hired you for a hands-off reconnaissance mission, not a suicide op. As of the moment Lockhart told me the operation was scrubbed, you were off the hook. You’re not part of the Laundry. You don’t want to be part of the organization. So you’ve done your bit; game’s over, you can go home and collect your pay packet with a clear conscience and a job well…okay, a job that would have been well done if the snark wasn’t a boojum after all.” He clears his throat. “I, on the other hand, swore a binding oath to defend the realm against certain threats, of which this is clearly one. Schiller made it my business when he stuck his nose into our tent back in London. Now, my job doesn’t stop until it’s over. If I was a complete bastard like some of my managers, I’d be looking for a way to blackmail you into giving your all for Blighty. But I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience. So once we’ve confirmed the target and gotten the word out, I want you to—”
Persephone can’t contain her laughter anymore: she starts to giggle. “Oh dear. Is that what you think?”
“Uh?”
“You listen to me. I am not going to leave this job half-done, and I am certain Johnny will say exactly the same when you ask him. You are not the only person here with a reason to put Schiller out of business.”
Howard hunkers down in his chair. “Oh,” he says quietly. “Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.”
“Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”
They drive on in silence for another ten minutes before Persephone feels calm enough to try to explain.
“The Laundry, Mr. Howard. It’s not noted for enabling high achievers, is it?”
“What?” He looks puzzled. “What, you mean—”
“It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.” She pauses to maneuver around a nose-to-tail queue of trucks that are making bad time on an uphill stretch, slowing as she sees red-and-blue lights on the shoulder ahead. “Wizards and visionaries are all very good but you cannot count on them for legwork and form-filling. Which is why there is tail-chasing and make-work and so many committee meetings and reports to read and checklists to fill out, to keep the low achievers preoccupied.
“Now, I suspect Gerald Lockhart didn’t brief you on certain…aspects of his department. Like its relationship with what is sometimes jokingly called Mahogany Row. And it’s not my place to brief you for him, but you appear to be working on the assumption that the tail wags the dog, not vice versa. So let me put it to you that there’s more to the occult intelligence world than institutional bureaucracy. Sometimes a bureaucracy grinds up against a problem that requires a mad genius instead of an office full of patient researchers. And indeed, the mad genii predate the bureaucracy. The Laundry is like an oyster nursing an irritating grain of sand within layers of bureaucratic mother-of-pearl.”
The snow is falling in ever-heavier sheets, obscuring the roadside signage and turning the slopes to either side of the freeway into blank white planes. “Sometimes they try to nurture the talent within the organization. You usually work for Dr. Angleton, don’t you? Yes, I suspect you’re one of them. The specialists who come up through the ranks. And then there are the external assets. Lockhart deals with those. Because sometimes the bureaucracy needs people who can do things that bureaucrats are not allowed to do, people who can work outside the law or who have unique skills. The organization needs to scratch its own back.”
She thumps the steering wheel hub hard. Howard jerks upright. “What?”
“I am not outside your agency, Mr. Howard, I am outside your organization chart. And I’m outside it because I am more useful on the outside. Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone. If I was embedded within the organization I would spend most of my time in committee meetings, writing reports, and arguing with imbeciles. I would be far less efficient under such constraints, and I am not a patient woman.”
The idiots in Rome, endlessly bickering over who had killed her parents, had tried her patience sorely. And the patronizing men at the Ministry with their no job for a little girl. The British organization, at least, had a more pragmatic approach—one reflecting its antique collegiate origins, all the way back to Sir Francis Walsingham and John Dee; never mind its wartime expansion into a special operations team, willing to take anyone whether or not they had been to the right school or university. Buried somewhere in the lard-belly of committee agendas and office politics is a steel spine, and the arrangement they offered her has proven to be very satisfactory.
“The Laundry is stranger and older than you probably realize,” she says quietly. “And the core, the informal group the bureaucrats call Mahogany Row, goes back even further. For hundreds of years they existed, a select band of practitioners of the dark sciences, solitary by nature, funded out of the House of Lords’ black budget.” Howard’s jaw flaps, silently; it’s always amusing to watch their reaction when they learn the truth. “Mahogany Row, the bureaucrats call it. They don’t know the half of it. The larger organization, b
uilt from the guts of SOE, was created purely to support the wizards of the invisible college; these days, the civil servants think they’re the real thing. But only because the occupants of those empty offices choose not to disabuse them of such a useful misconception.
“I believe Gerald Lockhart may have misled you about our working relationship, Mr. Howard. Perhaps he implied that Johnny and I are contractors who work for the agency. A little white lie that lends us a bit more flexibility than we’d have if we spent all our hours filling in time sheets and attending meetings. That sort of stuff is Gerald’s job—dealing with the bureaucracy so that we don’t have to. Us? We go places, break plots, and kill demons.”
She closes her eyes briefly to consult her memory map, opens them again as a stupid minivan driver blazes past, spraying turbid slush everywhere. There are more flashing lights. The big USAF base is some miles ahead, off to the right, behind a chain-link fence surrounding the area of a medium-large European state.
“Forty to fifty minutes,” she says, pressing down on the accelerator. The yellow glare of the gate lies off to one side and astern, just beyond the horizon, lighting up the starless sky of the Other Place. An echoing glare of light lies dead ahead, straight down the highway. “Then we can shut down Schiller’s revival service.”
She glances sideways to check his reaction to her words. Howard is staring intently at the pizza box on his lap instead of listening.
“What is it?” she asks.
Howard looks up. “I think they’re onto us,” he says.
MORNING AT THE NEW LIFE CHURCH.
The New Life Church isn’t just a church—it’s a campus and office complex, with multiple buildings housing the World Prayer Center and a whole slew of small group ministries focussing on specialized niches.
Its worshipers are, in Raymond Schiller’s eschatology, misguided at best and damned at worst; or they were, until he convinced the Board of Overseers to give him a fair hearing at a prayer retreat in the compound near Palmer Lake. The Board of Overseers have now been Saved, and are duly grateful. As a sign of appreciation they have agreed to make the main sanctuary available for Ray’s big tent event, in a joyous celebration of the Golden Promise Ministries’ bounteous commitment to the people of Colorado Springs. In fact, they’re pulling out all the stops to bring their flock to the true cause—they’ve rearranged the main sanctuary for a largely standing congregation and, with the Sheriff’s Department providing volunteer fire marshals and a waiver, they’ve got a roof to cover 8,000 souls. New Life only has about 9,000 regulars at present and barely a third are likely to show for a non-Sunday special organized by a different local church, but Golden Promise have been love-bombing Colorado Springs and environs with advertisements for the event for the past week; and once they’re Saved, the new converts will be most zealous in their attempts to bring friends and family along.
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