**Are you going to let me go once we get through this game of twenty questions? Or do you have something else in mind?** She crosses her legs, watching me alertly. Every guy I've ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, I recall.
**I wasn't joking,** she adds, defensively.
**I didn't think you were. I just want to know who your real target is.** She sniffs. **Ellis Billington. What's your problem?**
**I'm not sure. Bear with me for one last test?**
**What?** She half stands as I get off the bed, but the constraining field prohibits her from reaching me: **Hey!
Ow! You bastard!** It brings tears to my eyes. I clutch my right foot and wait for the pain to subside from where I kicked the bed-base.
Ramona is bent over, hugging her foot as well. **Okay,** I mumble, then kneel down and switch off the signal generator.
I don't particularly want to switch it off — I feel a hell of a lot safer with Ramona trapped inside a pentacle; the idea of setting her free makes my skin crawl — but the flip side of the entanglement is fairly clear: not only can we talk without being overheard, there are other (and drastically less pleasant) side effects.
**You're not a masochist, are you?** she asks tightly as she hobbles towards the bathroom.
**No **
**Good.** She slams the door shut. A few seconds later I clutch at my crotch in horror as I feel the unmistakable sensation of a full bladder emptying. It takes me seconds to realize it's not mine. My fingers are dry.
**Bitch!** Two can play at that game.
**It's your fault for keeping me waiting for ages.** I breathe deeply. **Look. I didn't ask for this — **
**Me neither!**
** — so why don't we call it a truce?** Silence, punctuated by a sharp sense of impatience.
**Took you long enough, monkey-boy.**
**What's with the monkey-boy business?** I complain.
**What's with the abhuman-bloodsucking-demon-whore imagery?** she responds acidly. **Try to keep your gibbering religious bigotry out of my head and I'll leave your bladder alone. Deal?**
**Deal — hey! How the hell am I a gibbering religious bigot? I'm an atheist!**
**Yeah, and the horse you rode in on is a member of the College of Cardinals.** I hear the toilet flush through the door, a sudden reminder that we're not actually talking.
**You may not believe in God but you still believe in Hell.
And you think it's where people like me belong.**
**But isn't that where you come from ...?** The door opens. Her glamour's as strong as ever: she looks like she just stepped out of a cocktail party to powder her nose.
**We can go over it some other time, Bob. You can just call room service if you want to eat, I have to make more elaborate arrangements. See you tomorrow.** With that, she picks up her evening bag from the bedside table and departs in a snit.
"Mo"
"Hi! Where are — hold on a moment — Bob? You still there? I was about to jump in the bath. How's it going"
Gulp. "About a ton of horse manure just landed on me.
Have you seen Angleton this week"
"No, they've billeted me in the Monkfish Motel again and it's really dull — you know what the night life in Dunwich is like. So what's Angleton up to now"
"I, uh, well, I got here — Darmstadt — to find — " I double-check my phone to confirm we're in secure mode " — new orders waiting for me, care of Boris and the two mad mice.
Almost got run off the autobahn on the way in and, well — "
"Car accident"
"Sort of. Anyway, I'm being shunted off on a side trip instead of coming home. So I won't be back for the weekend."
"Shit."
"My thoughts exactly."
"Where are they sending you"
"To Saint Martin, in the Caribbean."
"The — "
"And it gets worse."
"Do I want to hear this, love"
"Probably not." Pause. "Okay. I'm sitting down."
"It's a joint operation. They've inflicted a minder from the Black Chamber on me."
"But — Bob! That's crazy! It just doesn't happen! Nobody even knows what the Black Chamber is really called! 'No Such Agency' meets 'Destroy Before Reading.' Are you telling me ..."
"I haven't been fully briefed. But I figure it's going to be extremely ungood, for, like, Amsterdam values of ungood." I shudder. Our little weekend trip to Amsterdam involved more trouble than you can shake a shitty stick at. "I guess you know the Chamber specializes in taking the HUM out of HUMINT? Golems and remote viewing and so forth, never send a human agent to do a job a zombie can do? Anyway, the minder they've sent me is, you know, existentially challenged.
They've sicced a demon on me."
"Jesus, Bob."
"Yeah, well, He isn't answering the phone."
"I can't believe it. The bastards."
"Listen, I've got a feeling there's more to this than meets the eye and I need someone watching my back who isn't just looking for a good spot to sink their fangs into. Can you do some discreet digging when you get back to the office? Ask Andy, perhaps? This is under Angleton, by the way."
"Angleton." Mo's voice goes flat and cold, and the hair on the back of my neck rises. She blames Angleton for a lot of things, and it could turn very ugly if she decides to let it all hang out. "I should have guessed. It's about time that bastard faced the music."
"Don't go after him!" I say urgently. "You're not meant to know this. Remember, all you know is I've been sent off somewhere to do a job."
"But you want me to keep my ear to the ground and listen for oncoming train wrecks."
"That's about the size of it. I'm missing you."
"Love you, too." A pause. "What is it about this spook that's got you so upset"
Whoops. I'm no good at hiding things from her, am I?
"For starters she's crazier than a legful of ferrets. She's seriously bad magic, wearing a perpetual glamour — level three, if I'm any judge of such things. The only thing keeping her on track is the geas that ate Montana. She's not a free actor.
Actress."
"Uh-huh. What else"
I lick my lips. "Boris, um, applied some sort of destinyentanglement protocol to us. I didn't run away fast enough."
"Destiny — what? Entanglement? What's that"
I take a deep breath. "I'm not sure, but I'd appreciate it if you could find out and tell me. Because whatever it is, it's scaring me."
It's still early in the evening, but my encounter with Ramona has shaken me, and I don't much want to run into Pinky and Brains again (if they haven't already packed up and left: there's quite a lot of banging coming from next door). I decide to hole up in my room and lick my wounded dignity, so I order up a cardboard cheeseburger from room service, have a long soak under the shower, watch an infinitely forgettable movie on cable, and turn in for the night.
I don't usually remember my dreams because they're mostly surreal and/or incomprehensible — two-headed camels stealing my hovercraft, bat-winged squid gods explaining why I ought to accept job offers from Microsoft, that sort of thing — so what makes this one stand out is its sheer gritty realism. Dreaming that I'm me is fine. So is dreaming that I'm an employee of a vast software multinational, damned and enslaved by an ancient evil. But dreaming that I'm an overweight fifty-something German sales executive from an engineering firm in Dusseldorf is so far off the map that if I wasn't asleep I'd pinch myself. I'm at a regional sales convention and I've been drinking and living large. I like these conferences: I can get away from Hilda and cut loose party like a young thing again. The awards dinner is over and I split off with a couple of younger fellows I know vaguely, which is how we end up in the casino. I don't usually gamble much but I'm on a winning streak at the wheel, and all the ladies love a winning streak; between the brandy, the Cohiba panatelas, and the babe who's attached herself to my shoulder — a call girl, naturlich but classy — I'm having the time of m
y life. She leans against me and suggests I might cash in my winnings, and this strikes me as a good idea. After all, if I keep gambling, my streak will end sooner or later, won't it? Let it pay for her tonight.
We're in the lift, heading up to my room on the fourteenth floor, and she's nuzzling up against me. I haven't felt smooth flesh like this in ... too long. Hilda was never like that and since the kids the only side of her body she's shown me is the sharp edge of her tongue: serves her right if I enjoy myself once in a while. The babe's got her arms around me inside my jacket and I can feel her body through her dress.
Wow. This has been a day to remember! We cuddle some more and I lead her to my room, tiptoeing — she's giggling quietly, telling me not to make a noise, not to disturb the neighbors — and I get the door open and she tells me to go wait in the bathroom while she gets ready. How much does she want? I ask. She shakes her head and says, Two hundred but only if I'm happy. Well, how can I refuse an offer like that?
In the bathroom I take my shoes off, remove my jacket and tie — enough. She calls to say she's ready, and I open the door. She's lying on the bed, in a provocative position that still allows her to see me. She's taken off her dress: smooth, stocking-clad thighs and a waterfall of pure corn-silk hair, blue eyes like ice diamonds that I can fall into and drown.
My heart is pounding as if I've run a marathon, or I'm about to have a heart attack. She's smiling at me, hungry, needy; I take a step forwards. My back is clammy with cold sweat and my crotch feels like a steel bar, painfully erect. I need her like I've never needed a woman before. Another step. Another.
She smiles and kneels on the carpet in front of me, opening her mouth to take me in. I dread her touch, even though I blindly crave it. Tap-dancing on the third rail, I think fuzzily, trying to force my paralyzed ribs to take a racking breath of air as she reaches out to touch me.
"Uh-uh!"
I open my eyes. It's dark in the hotel room, my heart's hammering, and I'm lying in a puddle of cold sweat with an erection like a lump of wood and a ghastly sense of horror squatting on my chest. "Uh!" All I can do is grunt feebly. I flail for a bit, then shove the clammy sheet away from me.
I'm erect — and it's not like waking from an erotic dream, it's more like someone's using a farmyard device to milk me. "Ugh." I begin to sit up, meaning to go to the bathroom and towel my back off, and right then I come.
It's weird, and wonderful, like no orgasm I've ever had before. It seems to go on and on forever, scratching the unscratchable itch inside me with an intensity that rapidly becomes unbearable. There's something about it that feels terminal — not repeatable, an endpoint in someone's life.
When it begins to subside I whimper slightly and reach for my crotch. Surprise: I'm still erect — and my skin is dry.
That wasn't me, I realize, disturbed. That was Ramona — I clutch my prick protectively.
Distant laughter. **Go on, jerk yourself off.** There's a warm glow of satisfaction in her stomach. **You know you really want to, don't you?** she thinks, licking her lips and sending me the taste of semen. Then I feel her reach over and pull the sheets up over the dead businessman's face.
I manage to reach the bathroom and lift the toilet lid before I throw up. My stomach knots and tries to climb my throat. Every guy I've ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, she said, and now I know why. She's right about one thing: despite the sudden gag reflex I'm still sprouting a woody. Despite everything, despite the dread, despite the almost furtive guilt I feel, I really enjoyed whatever it is Ramona just did. And now I feel inexplicably guilty on account of Mo, because I wasn't looking for an adventure on the side — and I feel really dirty as well, because I found it exciting.
The overspill from what Ramona was doing turned me on in my sleep, but the reason I'm throwing up now is that what she was doing wasn't sex: she was feeding on the guy's mind, and he died, and it gave her an orgasm, and I got off on it. I want to scrub my brains out with a wire brush, and I want to crawl into a deep hole m the ground, and I want to do it all over again ... because I'm entangled with her, I hope, but the alternative is worse: there are some things I don't want to find out about myself, and a secret taste for hot, kinky demon sex is one of them.
I really hope Mo finds out that this entanglement thing is reversible. Because if it isn't, the next time she and I go to bed together — Let's not think about that right now.
I spend an uneasy night tossing and turning between damp sheets despite the dream catcher Screensaver I leave running on my tablet PC. By dawn I've just about worried myself into a mild nervous breakdown: if it's not trying to avoid thinking about invisible pink elephants (subtype: maneaters), it's what Angleton's got in mind for me in Saint Martin. I don't even know where the place is on a map.
Meanwhile, the committee meeting is another unwelcome distraction. How am I supposed to represent my organization when I'm terrified of falling asleep?
I somehow manage to fumble my way into my suit — an uncomfortable imposition required for overseas junkets — then shamble downstairs to the dining room for breakfast.
Coffee, I need coffee. And a copy of the Independent, imported from London on an overnight flight. The restaurant is a model of German efficiency and the staff mostly leave me alone, for which I'm grateful I'm just about feeling human again by a quarter to nine, the meeting's optimistically scheduled to start in another fifteen minutes, but at a guess half the delegates will still be working on their breakfasts. So I wander over to the lobby where there's free WiFi, to see if there are any messages for me, and that's when I run into Franz.
"Bob? Is that you"
I blink stupidly. "Franz"
"Bob!" We do the handshake thing, feinting around our centers of gravity with briefcases held out to either side, like a pair of nervous chickens sizing each other up in a farmyard.
I haven't seen Franz in a suit before, and he hasn't seen me in one either. I met him on a training seminar about six months ago when he was over from Den Haag. He's very tall and very Dutch, which means his accent is a lot more BBC-perfect than mine. "Fancy meeting you here."
"I guess you must be on the joint-session list"
"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he jokes. "I was just looking for a postcard before I go upstairs ... will you wait"
"Sure." I relax slightly. "Have you done one of these before"
"No." He spins the rack idly, looking at the picturesque gingerbread castles one by one. "Have you"
"I've done one, period. Shouldn't talk about it outside class, but what the hell."
Franz finds a postcard showing a beaming buxom German barmaid clutching a pair of highly suggestive jugs. "I'll have this one." He attracts the attention of the nearest sales clerk and rattles something off in what sounds to me like flawless German. My tablet finishes checking for mail, bins the spam, and dings at me to put it away. I rub my head and glance at Franz enviously I bet he wouldn't have any problems with Ramona: he's scarily bright, good-natured, incisive, handsome, cultured, and all-round competent. Not to mention being able to out-drink me and charm the socks off everyone who meets him. He's clearly on his way up the ladder of the ATVD's occult counterintelligence division, and he'll make deputy director while I'm still polishing Angleton's filing cabinet.
"Ready?" he asks.
"Guess so."
We head for the lift to the conference room. It's on the fourth floor. Lest you think this is an altogether too casual approach to confidential business, the hotel is security certified and our hosts have block-booked the adjacent rooms and the suites immediately above and below. It's not as if we're going to be discussing matters of national security, either.
Franz and I are early. There's a coffee urn and cups in place on the sideboard, an LCD projector and screen next to the boardroom table, and comfortable leather-lined swivel chairs to fall asleep in. I claim one corner of the table, opposite the windows with their daydream-friendly view of downtown Darmstadt, and plunk my tab
let down on the leather place mat beside the hotel notepad. "Coffee?" asks Franz.
"Yes, please. Milk, no sugar." I pick up the agenda and carry it over.
"What's the routine?" he asks. He actually sounds interested.
"Well. We show each other our authorizations first. Then the chair orders the doors sealed." I wave at the far end of the suite: "Rest room's through there. Chair this time is — " I riffle the sheets " — Italy, which means Anna, unless she's ill and they send a replacement. She'll keep things tight, I think. Then we get down to business."
"I see. And the minutes ..."
"Everyone who's got a presentation is supposed to bring copies on CD-ROM. The host organization[6 The Geheime Sicherheit Abteilung to their mothers, although everyone else calls them the Faust Force.] provides a secretarial service, that's the GSA's job this time."
Franz's brow wrinkles. "Excuse me for saying, but this sounds as if the meeting itself is ... unnecessary? We could take it to email."
I shrug. "Yup. But then we wouldn't get to do the real business, over coffee and biscuits."
His expression clears. "Ah, now I see — "
The door opens. "Ciao, guys!" It's Anna, short and bubbly and (I suspect) a little hung-over, judging from her eyes.
"Oh, my head. Where is everybody? Let us keep this short, shall we"
She makes a beeline for the coffee pot. "Tell Andrew he is a naughty, naughty man," she chides me.
"What's he done now?" I ask, steeling myself.
"He got my birthday wrong!" Flashing eyes, toothy grin.
"A, what is it, a fencepost error."
"Oh, uh, yeah, I'll do that." I shrug. I'm still uncomfortable in this type of situation. Most of the people here were grades above me until six months ago, and half of them still are, I'm very much the junior delegate and Andy — who used to be one of my managers — is the guy into whose boots I've stepped. "Last time I saw him he was kind of busy. Overworked dealing with fallout from — " I clear my throat.
"Oh, say no more." She pats me on the arm and moves on to say hello to the other delegates who're letting themselves in. We ought to have a full house of security management types from Spain Brussels, and parts east within NATO, but for some reason attendance today looks unusually light.
The Jennifer Morgue l-3 Page 6