“That’s—” Mhari shakes her head.
“Crazy?” I ask. “Do you know who the agency in question is?”
Jim’s frown deepens. “As it happens, I do.” He glances at Ramona, then Mhari, then back at me. “Promise this won’t go any further?”
“Promise—” I stop dead just as Ramona nods slowly.
“I think I see where this is going,” she says tonelessly.
Mhari’s eyes narrow. “Spill it,” she tells Jim.
Jim nods, very slightly, then glances at me. “I’ll thank you for not spreading this any further,” he tells us, “but you know full well that most police officers have not been briefed about the existence and true purpose of the organization you people really belong to.”
The Laundry’s true purpose? I shrug. “Yes, but—” I stop. “You’re not telling me—” I begin.
“It’s the Specialist Crime and Operations Department.” He clears his throat, a worry frown forming at the corners of his lips, his eyes. “Very few of them—almost none of them—are cleared for Laundry-related material. And someone up top, high enough to have tons of clout but nevertheless not on the briefing list, decided that in view of the rising tide of supervandalism it would be a good idea to have a deep bunker for incident command and containment of dangerous individuals. I mean, you saw how small and under-equipped the cells at Belgravia nick are?”
I nod. “Carry on.”
“It came from the top down a while ago, and I didn’t get the memo because I was on secondment: it was while we were on that fisheries jaunt. Aldwych is being rented until the CrossRail TBMs can be redeployed to build us a proper facility—if we get the budget for it, of course. So the first element of the rebuild was to shut off street-level access. Once construction has finished, they’ll partly reopen the stairwell, but as an oubliette so that villains can be sent down but can’t get back up. They’re going to run it like an ICBM silo, with watch crews on duty and underground access only via special trains.” He looks disapproving. “The next Criminal Justice Act will make changes to our ability to detain suspects for questioning without charge just to make this work.”
“Well, that’s—” I hesitate to say nice.
“How good of them to keep us fully informed!” Ramona chirps pointedly. Jim avoids her gaze.
I roll my eyes. “People, please let’s try not to get into the habit of saying what we think all the time?” Ramona is actually right: the Met setting up a secure supervillain nick without telling us stinks like a month-old fish. It reeks of maneuvering under false colors. Someone in the executive suite is trying to cut us out of the action on our own turf. What else might they be hiding from us? But it’s impolitic to say that sort of thing aloud, especially on the record.
“I’m very sorry.” Jim finishes his coffee. “But it’s strictly hands-off. There’s some kind of pissing match going on in the executive suite at the Yard—at a guess they’ve got a couple of Deputy Commissioners squabbling for who gets to run the new specialist command. You don’t get to that level without being a political officer, if you follow my drift. Doubtless they’ll end up making a bid for our unit in due course.” He sounds disgusted. “Save me from empire builders.” He pauses. “It’s probably worth my skin if word gets out that I told you this.”
“Well, that’s just peachy,” I manage. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with us, Officer Friendly. So, um, do we have anything else to talk about this morning?”
It turns out that there is nothing else to discuss, which is probably a good thing. They say if you start each day by swallowing a live toad nothing can possibly make it worse, but after that piece of news I’m not so sure.
And then my day really begins to turn to shit.
I’m shutting down my laptop to go and do lunch with the Senior Auditor when I get a voice call from Alison in HR. “Dr. O’Brien?” She sounds worried.
“Hi! You caught me on the way out of the office. Is there anything I can—” I do a double take and nearly facepalm. “Is this about Jim Grey?”
“Yes, yes it is.”
I’m on edge immediately because there’s a brief pause between her words that doesn’t feel right. “What’s the problem?”
“Well, you asked me to look into his medical background and the details of his armor, and, um, it puts me in a sticky position. I’m afraid I can’t help you. I mean, I can’t. Medical files are legally privileged information. But you mentioned his armor? I can confirm that it’s definitely unpowered. If you’ve seen him walking through walls in it, that’s entirely due to his own powers. It’s also tailored closely to fit. I am allowed to say that he first manifested superhuman abilities nearly fourteen months ago. Um. Doctor? I know this isn’t my field, but if he isn’t being screened for K syndrome on an ongoing basis, he could be heading for big medical trouble.”
I put the phone down with an oh-shit sensation in the pit of my stomach: not just the usual headache of sending one of my staff for a bunch of tiresome medical tests and juggling rotas to cover for him, but a nauseous sense of dread. Good news: Jim’s armor isn’t haunted. If I see Officer Friendly flying around, then he’s Jim, which means he isn’t holding out on me—isn’t a sock puppet for Freudstein. Bad news, though: Jim’s vulnerable, just like any other occult practitioner. And something in me balks at the idea of exposing him to threats that force him to use his powers in ways that make his gray matter a tempting tidbit for the feeders. But that’s the sort of threat I’m supposed to expose him to, daily, as part of our job! It hasn’t been a problem with Bob, for ages—his entanglement with the Eater of Souls protects him, just as Lecter insulates me from their attentions. But Jim is vulnerable, and I can’t be detached about it anymore: I’ve fallen into a conflict of interest.
So I’m feeling particularly fragile as I catch the tube across London, feeling naked again in the absence of my instrument. Being out and about on business without a violin case slung over my shoulder simply feels wrong. Try to imagine James Bond without a gun or a Martini in sight: It’s incongruous, isn’t it? But I have to leave Lecter behind in a secure storage lock-up because I’m on my way to have lunch with Dr. Armstrong to talk about the white violin. I’m not sure Lecter can hear, exactly, but he can tap into my senses eerily well at times, and I have a feeling that having him listening to the conversation I intend to have would be a really bad idea.
And so, to the office with the disturbing dimensions and the secret stash of really rather good single malt—not that I plan on consuming any: I need my wits about me.
“Ah, Mo! Come in, come in.” Most people do office casual only on Friday, if at all, so I’m slightly taken aback to be confronted by the SA in a knitted wool cardigan and tartan bedroom slippers. I enter anyway. “Is something the matter?” he asks, focusing over my shoulder.
“Yes, I think so.” I let the door shut, then sit down in his visitor’s chair without waiting to be invited. “It’s about Lec—I’m sorry, it’s about the white violin. And it’s about Officer Friendly as well, but mostly the violin.”
“Ah. So it’s time for that conversation,” he mutters as he sits behind his desk, takes his spectacles off, and polishes them with a microfiber cloth. He glances at me, his gaze startlingly intimate without the intervening crystal barrier that normally screens him. “How far has he pushed: speaking to you in your dreams, sending you entirely new dreams, or actual possession?”
“All of the above,” I admit. “Although the only incident of possession so far was when”—bleeding on the fretboard as the bow drags my fingers across blue-glowing strings, a terrified pale figure crouching before me in the living room—“in a moment of extreme emotional stress and exhaustion I was confronted by what I perceived to be a threat.”
“And?” he prompts gently.
I shudder. “Bob was there: he managed to talk me down before anything too bad happened.”
; “Well.” He picks up his half-moon reading glasses and puts them on, then carefully adjusts them before he looks at me. His delay doesn’t inspire confidence. “How long ago did that happen?”
“The morning after the Code Red.”
The SA nods thoughtfully. Is it just my overactive imagination, or is he really disturbed? “It would have been good to have known the full scope of your reasons for misgivings earlier,” he says, slowly, choosing his words with the care of a man walking across an uneven icy pavement. “I think I may have underestimated the urgency of your earlier concerns, Doctor. Are you sure you can continue to control the white violin? What do you call him?”
“Lecter.” It slips out before my internal censor can block it, and he winces visibly. I carry on, feeling distinctly reckless: “And no, I’m not sure I can hold him in check at all times. When I took down Strip Jack Spratt, Lecter nearly weaseled me into strangling him. I had a big fight with him a couple of weeks ago and threatened to chuck him in the English Channel if he didn’t stay out of my dreams—he backed off, then—but it’s only a matter of time before an incident crops up where . . . well. As long as he gets his blood, I think he’ll do what I want; the problem is what happens if I have to stand down before he’s fed.”
I stare at the backs of my hands. I feel as if I just confessed to personal inadequacy. Get it off your chest, they say: but nothing about the hollow dread, the unanswered question, what happens next, that fills your mind after confession. Somehow while I’ve been carrying the bone violin, the veins and tendons have risen to the surface: flesh falling away from the metacarpals, skin loosening and losing its elasticity, thinning, becoming almost transparent: it’s been years, and I’m growing older, and I’m just too tired to arm-wrestle with dream-demons whenever I need to do my job. I look up at the SA. “I can keep him under lockdown and only bring him along on major incidents; I can probably continue to do the job on that basis for a while longer . . . but I’m losing fine control, and sooner or later there’ll be an accident.”
Dr. Armstrong stares at my eyes. Then he nods, just a slight inclination of the chin. I don’t need to tell him what “an accident” means, for which I am profoundly grateful—I can tell he’s imagining the writing on the wall, sprayed in the arterial blood of innocent victims.
“I understand,” he says softly. An ambiguously pensive expression tugs a curtain of worry lines down across his forehead, gathered in swags by the corners of his eyes. “You’ve reached the limit of your ability to control the white violin, and if you continue to do so, the risk of an unacceptable incident will rise sharply.”
I nod, unable to trust my voice.
“Very well, then.” He pauses. “Mo. What I am going to say next is in strictest confidence and must go no further. In particular, you must not share this with your staff. Any of them. Do you understand?”
What the hell? I nod again, utterly taken aback.
“The Police and Home Office rely on police intelligence assets for their situational awareness.” His diction is fussily precise, as if he’s repeating a briefing paper he read and memorized for just this contingency. “In particular, police intelligence is oriented towards supporting police operations. It has to deliver evidence that will stand up in court: it is constrained by rules that do not necessarily apply to defense intelligence organizations.” (Like us, I interpret.) “Defense intel organizations, in contrast, operate under rules of compartmentalization that might seem excessively onerous to the police, who take a more collegiate approach to apprehending bad actors.
“So. I’m going to ask you to take it on trust when I assure you that it is utterly essential to the agenda of OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE that you continue to act as the white violin’s custodian until the end of this month—for another three weeks. You can and must take steps to minimize the risk of collateral damage: keep the instrument in a warded safe at all times, only remove it in response to an emergency, cease regular practice with it. I can arrange a prescription for strong sleeping pills if necessary. But I need you to continue in your current role until the end of the month.”
I lick my lips. “Why? What agenda? What happens then?”
“Then?” He smiles humorlessly as he ignores my first two questions and evades the third: “Then you can set down your burden. The violin will either go to a new carrier”—he’s bluffing, we’ve got nobody else remotely strong enough to pick up the instrument: Lecter would eat their soul and turn them into a pithed zombie within an hour—“or be consigned to a secure repository until such time as we are forced to revisit the balance of risk versus safety. You will be retired from that particular duty, but in any case I believe we are due to review your career development path in preparation for your forthcoming promotion: you’ll have plenty to keep you busy.”
Forthcoming promotion? What forthcoming promotion? He said we. That means the Auditors . . . I’m still puzzling it over when he continues: “The real purpose behind OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE is that we have reason to believe that the organization operating behind the cover identity of Professor Freudstein is fully aware of the white violin and intends to make a play for it.”
It’s like a punch to the guts. As Bob would say in one of his more annoying Reddit moments: Wait, what is this, I don’t even. The violin is a seriously classified asset: most of our sister agencies don’t know about it, much less random Mad Science villains. I manage to restrain my reaction to a terse, “You cannot be serious!”
“Oh, but I am.” At some point in the past minute his smile warped into a grimace. “And that’s all I can tell you, other than to point out the obvious: if the white violin is locked down in a secure vault, either Freudstein will be thwarted—in which case, they’ll come up with some other mischief before we can smoke them out—or they’ll attack the vault, in which case there will be a horrible mess. In the worst case, Freudstein will take the violin and we’ll take the blame. Unthinkable. I believe an active defense—you—will do a better job than any passive defense we can organize. Especially after the Code Red incident demonstrated certain shortcomings in our ability to manage our institutional threat surface.”
“You’re setting me up as a target,” I hear myself saying, as if from a great distance.
“Yes. Wasn’t that obvious?”
He waits for an explosion: I don’t think I want to give him one, but I am so very tempted. Duty, however, wins out. I nod, trying not to clench my jaw. “Until the end of the month.”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure about this? There’s nothing else you can give me about Freudstein? No other way of drawing him—them—out?”
“I am very much afraid so.” He pauses. “We dropped the ball on this one before we even knew it was rolling. We were distracted by the other crises in train—mistakes were made.”
Mistakes were made. There’s a story here, but I’m effectively on the outside of the organization now, trying to peer in through the one-way mirror: “Do I get to hear the full story when the situation is, ah, resolved?”
“Yes.” He looks at me bleakly. “I know how hard this is, Dominique. I hope . . . I hope and trust you’ll agree with me that it was necessary, when you have the full facts.” He pause, then adds: “There is one thing. You must take pains to avoid tipping your staff off—but I am going to authorize the release of tracking wards for your team. Ostensibly to ensure your executives are reachable 24x7. You know what to do.”
I stand. “Yes, I do,” I say tightly.
“Was there anything else?” he asks.
I don’t trust myself to talk about Jim. “No, nothing important right now. Good-bye.” Then I walk out of his office feeling as if I’ve just been date-raped by my best friend.
18.
CASSILDA’S SONG
I go back to my shiny office with a brown-bag lunch and I sit at my desk, trying to eat despite my suddenly leaden stomach. I manage to choke dow
n half a low-calorie Mexican chicken wrap before a wave of nausea grips me and I quick-march to the bathroom, where I throw up as quietly as I can. Afterwards I lean on the washbasin until the dry heaves are definitely under control, then I brush out my hair and carefully check my face for makeup damage.
It’s not like I haven’t been staked out as a tethered goat before now. In fact, it’s how I ended up auditioning for the white violin in the first place: after the incident in Amsterdam with Bob and the museum archive and the tentacles, I went looking for some way of protecting myself. Because never again sounds pretty good if you’ve ever been grabbed by a halfway-sentient monster and used as a fishing lure: the phrase I’d rather die than do that again springs to mind, and I’m not exaggerating. If it happens again, going quietly into that dark night is my Plan B: Plan A is to fight like a rabid bobcat.
Anyway, the point is that Dr. Armstrong is thoroughly aware of my service record. If anyone should be expected to know better than to put me in such a position, it’d be him (or if not him, Bob: but Bob is not my line manager, for which, praise the Lord). And that’s why I’m throwing up in the bathroom (and trying not to let any sound escape: I don’t want to frighten everyone). I trust the SA would not do this to me unless in his professional opinion there was absolutely no alternative. Freudstein has run rings around the Police and backed the SA into a corner so tight that the only way out entails a risk of civilian collateral damage—no, let’s not be euphemistic here: scores of civilian deaths—and a senior agent’s sanity.
So he’s hung it on me like a fucking dead albatross. And there’s nobody to vent on, because he’s my regular workplace confessor—and Bob is unavailable. Worse, Bob is unreliable. (I know exactly what Bob would say if I told him about this—he’d tell me to spit in Dr. Armstrong’s eye, and I love him for it—but I can’t turn this assignment down because . . . you’ll agree with me that it was necessary, when you have the full facts.) Nor can I reasonably vent on anyone else: Jim, for example. Right. So be it resolved: at the end of the month Lecter is going to check in with Internal Assets for secure storage. And if I don’t agree that the ends justify the means in the case of this assignment, Dr. Armstrong will have my resignation.
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