Somewhere out there Ramona is lying in a watery hostel, learning what she really is. A new life lies ahead of her: she won't be able to come ashore after the change is complete.
Hey, if I really was James Bond, I could have a girl in every port — even the drowned ones.
"Bob. Would you have left me for her"
I shiver. "I don't think so." Actually, no. Which is not to say Ramona didn't have glamour of the non-magical kind as well, but there's something about what I have with Mo — "Well, then. And you're cut up about the idea that I might have been cheating on you."
I consider this for a few seconds. "Surprised"
"Well." She's silent, too. "I was worried. And I'm still worried about the other thing."
"The other thing"
"The possibility that we're going to be haunted by the ghost of James Bond."
"Oh, I dunno." I kick a pebble towards the waterline, watch it skitter, alone. "We could always do something totally un-Bond-like, to break any remaining echoes of the geas."
"You think?" She smiles. "Got any ideas"
My mouth is dry. "Yeah — yes, as a matter-of-fact I do." I take her in my arms and she puts her arms around me, and rests her face against the side of my neck. "If this was really the end of a Bond story, we'd go find a luxury hotel to hole up in, order a magnum of champagne, and fuck each other senseless."
She tenses. "Ah, I hadn't thought of that." A moment later, and faintly: "Damn."
"Well. I'm not saying it's impossible. But — " My heart is pounding again, and my knees are even weaker than they were when I realized Eileen hadn't shot her. "We've got to do it in such a way that it's completely incompatible with the geas."
"Okay, wise guy. So you've got a bright idea for an ending that simply wouldn't work in a Bond book"
"Yes. See, the thing is, Bond's creator — like Bond himself — was a snob. Upper crust, old Etonian, terribly conventional. If he was around today he'd always be wearing a tailored suit, you'd never catch him in ripped jeans and a Nine Inch Nails tee shirt. And it goes deeper. He liked sex, but he was deeply ingrained with a particular view of gender relationships. Man of action, woman as bit of fluff on the side. So the one thing Bond would never expect one of his girls to say is — " it's now or never " — will... will you marry me?" I can't help it; my voice ends up a strangled squeak, as befits the romantic interest doing something as shockingly unconventional as proposing to the hero.
"Oh, Bob!" She hugs me tighter: "Of course! Yes!" She's squeaking, too, I realize dizzily: Is this normal? We kiss.
"Especially if it means we can hole up in a luxury hotel, order in a magnum of champagne, and fuck each other senseless without being haunted by the ghost of James Bond. You've got a sick and twisted mind — that's why I love you!"
"I love you, too," I add. And as we walk along the beach, holding hands and laughing, I realize that we're free.
PIMPF
I HATE DAYS LIKE THIS IT'S A RAINY MONDAY MORNING AND I'M LATE IN to work at the Laundry because of a technical fault on the Tube. When I get to my desk, the first thing I find is a note from Human Resources that says one of their management team wants to talk to me, soonest, about playing computer games at work. And to put the cherry on top of the shit-pie, the office's coffee percolator is empty because none of the other inmates in this goddamn loony bin can be arsed refilling it. It's enough to make me long for a high place and a rifle ... but in the end I head for Human Resources to take the bull by the horns decaffeinated and mean as only a decaffeinated Bob can be.
Over in the dizzying heights of HR, the furniture is fresh and the windows recently cleaned. It's a far cry from the dingy rats' nest of Ops Division, where I normally spend my working time. But ours is not to wonder why (at least in public).
"Ms. MacDougal will see you now," says the receptionist on the front desk, looking down her nose at me pityingly.
"Do try not to shed on the carpet, we had it steam cleaned this morning." Bastards.
I slouch across the thick, cream wool towards the inner sanctum of Emma MacDougal, senior vice-superintendent, Personnel Management (Operations), trying not to gawk like a resentful yokel at the luxuries on parade. It's not the first time I've been here, but I can never shake the sense that I'm entering another world, graced by visitors of ministerial import and elevated budget. The dizzy heights of the real civil service, as opposed to us poor Morlocks in Ops Division who keep everything running.
"Mr. Howard, do come in." I straighten instinctively when Emma addresses me. She has that effect on most people — she was born to be a headmistress or a tax inspector, but unfortunately she ended up in Human Resources by mistake and she's been letting us know about it ever since.
"Have a seat." The room reeks of quiet luxury by Laundry standards: my chair is big, comfortable, and hasn't been bumped, scraped, and abraded into a pile of kindling by generations of visitors. The office is bright and airy, and the window is clean and has a row of attractively un-browned potted plants sitting before it. (The computer squatting on her desk is at least twice as expensive as anything I've been able to get my hands on via official channels, and it's not even switched on) "How good of you to make time to see me." She smiles like a razor. I stifle a sigh; it's going to be one of those sessions.
"I'm a busy man." Let's see if deadpan will work, hmm?
;"
"I'm sure you are. Nevertheless." She taps a piece of paper sitting on her blotter and I tense. "I've been hearing disturbing reports about you, Bob."
Oh, bollocks. "What kind of reports?" I ask warily.
Her smile's cold enough to frost glass. "Let me be blunt.
I've had a report — I hesitate to say who from — about you playing computer games in the office."
Oh. That. "I see."
"According to this report you've been playing rather a lot of Neverwinter Nights recently." She runs her finger down the printout with relish. "You've even sequestrated an old departmental server to run a persistent realm — a multiuser online dungeon." She looks up, staring at me intently. "What have you got to say for yourself"
I shrug. What's to say? She's got me bang to rights. — "Um."
"Um indeed." She taps a finger on the page. "Last Tuesday you played Neverwinter Nights for four hours. This Monday you played it for two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, staying on for an hour after your official flexitime shift ended. That's six straight hours. What have you got to say for yourself?"
"Only six?" I lean forwards.
"Yes. Six hours." She taps the memo again. "Bob. What are we paying you for"
I shrug. "To put the hack into hack-and-slay."
"Yes, Bob, we're paying you to search online role-playing games for threats to national security. But you only averaged four hours a day last week ... isn't this rather a poor use of your time"
Save me from ambitious bureaucrats. This is the Laundry, the last overmanned organization of the civil service in London, and they're everywhere — trying to climb the greasy pole, playing snakes and ladders with the org chart, running esoteric counterespionage operations in the staff" toilets, and rationing the civil service tea bags. I guess it serves Mahogany Row's purposes to keep them running in circles and distracting one another, but sometimes it gets in the way. Emma MacDougal is by no means the worst of the lot: she's just a starchy Human Resources manager on her way up, stymied by the full promotion ladder above her. But she's trying to butt in and micromanage inside my department (that is, inside Angleton's department), and just to show how efficient she is, she's actually been reading my time sheets and trying to stick her oar in on what I should be doing. To get out of MacDougal's office I had to explain three times that my antiquated workstation kept crashing and needed a system rebuild before she'd finally take the hint.
Then she said something about sending me some sort of administrative assistant — an offer that I tried to decline without causing mortal offense. Sensing an opening, I asked if she coul
d provide a budget line item for a new computer — but she spotted where I was coming from and cut me dead, saying that wasn't in HR's remit, and that was the end of it.
Anyway, I'm now looking at my watch and it turns out that it's getting on for lunch. I've lost another morning's prime gaming time. So I head back to my office, and just as I'm about to open the door I hear a rustling, crunching sound coming from behind it, like a giant hamster snacking down on trail mix. I can't express how disturbing this is. Rodent menaces from beyond space-time aren't supposed to show up during my meetings with HR, much less hole up in my office making disturbing noises. What's going on?
I rapidly consider my options, discarding the most extreme ones (Facilities takes a dim view of improvised ordnance discharges on Government premises), and finally do the obvious. I push the door open, lean against the battered beige filing cabinet with the jammed drawer, and ask, "Who are you and what are you doing to my computer"
I intend the last phrase to come out as an ominous growl, but it turns into a strangled squeak of rage. My visitor looks up at me from behind my monitor, eyes black and beady, and cheek-pouches stuffed with — ah, there's an open can of Pringles sitting on my intray. "Yuh"
"That's my computer." I'm breathing rapidly all of a sudden, and I carefully set my coffee mug down next to the light-sick petunia so that I don't drop it by accident. "Back away from the keyboard, put down the mouse, and nobody needs to get hurt." And most especially, my sixth-level cleric-sorcerer gets to keep all his experience points and gold pieces without some munchkin intruder selling them all on a dodgy auction site and re-skilling me as an exotic dancer with chloracne.
It must be my face, he lifts up his hands and stares at me nervously, then swallows his cud of potato crisps. "You must be Mr. Howard"
I begin to get an inkling. "No, I'm the grim fucking reaper." My eyes take in more telling details: his sallow skin, the acne and straggly goatee beard. Ye gods and little demons, it's like looking in a time-traveling mirror. I grin nastily. "I asked you once and I won't ask you again: Who are you"
He gulps. "I'm Pete. Uh, Pete Young. I was told to come here by Andy, uh, Mr. Newstrom. He says I'm your new intern."
"My new what...?" I trail off. Andy, you're a bastard! But I repeat myself. "Intern. Yeah, right. How long have you been here? In the Laundry, I mean."
He looks nervous. "Since last Monday morning,"
"Well, this is the first anyone's told me about an intern,"
I explain carefully, trying to keep my voice level because blaming the messenger won't help; anyway, if Pete's telling the truth he's so wet behind the ears I could use him to water the plants. "So now I'm going to have to go and confirm that.
You just wait here." I glance at my desktop. Hang on, what would I have done five or so years ago ...? "No, on second thoughts, come with me."
The Ops wing is a maze of twisty little passageways, all alike.
Cramped offices open off them, painted institutional green and illuminated by underpowered bulbs lightly dusted with cobwebs. It isn't like this on Mahogany Row or over the road in Administration, but those of us who actually contribute to the bottom line get to mend and make do. (There's a malicious, persistent rumor that this is because the Board wants to encourage a spirit of plucky us-against-the-world selfreliance in Ops, and the easiest way to do that is to make every requisition for a box of paper clips into a Herculean struggle. I subscribe to the other, less popular theory: they just don't care.) I know my way through these dingy tunnels; I've worked here for years. Andy has been a couple of rungs above me in the org chart for all that time. These days he's got a corner office with a blond Scandinavian pine desk. (It's a corner office on the second floor with a view over the alley where the local Chinese take-away keeps their dumpsters, and the desk came from IKEA, but his office still represents the cargo-cult trappings of upward mobility; we beggars in Ops can't be choosy.) I see the red light's out, so I bang on his door.
"Come in." He sounds even more world-weary than usual, and so he should be, judging from the pile of spreadsheet printouts scattered across the desk in front of him. "Bob"
He glances up and sees the intern. "Oh, I see you've met Pete."
"Pete tells me he's my intern," I say, as pleasantly as I can manage under the circumstances. I pull out the ratty visitor's chair with the hole in the seat stuffing and slump into it.
"And he's been in the Laundry since the beginning of this week." I glance over my shoulder; Pete is standing in the doorway looking uncomfortable, so I decide to move White Pawn to Black Castle Four or whatever it's called: "Come on in, Pete; grab a chair." (The other chair is a crawling horror covered in mouse-bitten lever arch files labeled STRICTLY SECRET.) It's important to get the message across that I'm not leaving without an answer, and camping my henchsquirt on Andy's virtual in-tray is a good way to do that.
(Now if only I can figure out what I'm supposed to be asking ...) "What's going on"
"Nobody told you?" Andy looks puzzled.
"Okay, let me rephrase. Whose idea was it, and what am I meant to do with him"
"I think it was Emma MacDougal's. In Human Resources." Oops, he said Human Resources. I can feel my stomach sinking already. "We picked him up in a routine sweep through Erewhon space last month." (Erewhon is a new Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that started up, oh, about two months ago, with only a few thousand players so far. Written by a bunch of spaced-out games programmers from Gothenburg.) "Boris iced him and explained the situation, then put him through induction.
Emma feels that it'd be better if we trialed the mentoring program currently on roll-out throughout Admin to see if it's an improvement over our traditional way of inducting new staff into Ops, and his number came up." Andy raises a fist and coughs into it, then waggles his eyebrows at me significantly. "As opposed to hiding out behind the wet shrubbery for a few months before graduating to polishing Angleton's gear-wheels?" I shrug. "Well, I can't say it's a bad Idea — " Nobody ever accuses HR of having a bad idea; they're subtle and quick to anger, and their revenge is terrible to behold. " — but a little bit of warning would have been nice. Some mentoring for the mentor, eh?"
The feeble quip is only a trial balloon, but Andy latches onto it immediately and with evident gratitude. "Yes, I completely agree! I'll get onto it at once."
I cross my arms and grin at him lopsidedly. "I'm waiting."
"You're — " His gaze slides sideways, coming to rest on Pete. "Hmm." I can almost see the wheels turning. Andy isn't aggressive, but he's a sharp operator. "Okay, let's start from the beginning. Bob, this fellow is Peter-Fred Young.
Peter-Fred, meet Mr. Howard, better known as Bob. I'm — "
" — Andy Newstrom, senior operational support manager, Department G," I butt in smoothly. "Due to the modern miracle of matrix management, Andy is my line manager but I work for someone else, Mr. Angleton, who is also Andy's boss. You probably won't meet him; if you do, it probably means you're in big trouble. That right, Andy"
"Yes, Bob," he says indulgently, picking right up from my cue. "And this is Ops Division." He looks at Peter-Fred Young. "Your job, for the next three months, is to shadow Bob. Bob, you're between field assignments anyway, and Project Aurora looks likely to keep you occupied for the whole time — Peter-Fred should be quite useful to you, given his background."
"Project Aurora?" Pete looks puzzled. Yeah, and me, too.
"What is his background, exactly?" I ask. Here it comes ...
"Peter-Fred used to design dungeon modules for a living."
Andy's cheek twitches. "The earlier games weren't a big problem, but I think vou can guess where this one's going."
"Hey, it's not my fault!" Pete hunches defensively. "I just thought it was a really neat scenario!"
I have a horrible feeling I know what Andy's going to say next. "The third-party content tools for some of the leading MMORPGs are getting pretty hairy these days. They're supposed to have some recognizers built i
n to stop the most dangerous design patterns getting out, but nobody was expecting Peter-Fred to try to implement a Delta Green scenario as a Neverwinter Nights persistent realm. If it had gone online on a public game server — assuming it didn't eat him during beta testing — we could have been facing a mass outbreak."
I turn and stare at Pete in disbelief. "That was him?"Jesus, I could have been killed!
He stares back truculently. "Yeah. Your wizard eats rice cakes!"
And an attitude to boot. "Andy, he's going to need a desk."
"I'm working on getting you a bigger office." He grins.
"This was Emma's idea, she can foot the bill."
Somehow I knew she had to be tied in with this, but maybe I can turn it to my advantage. "If Human Resources is involved, surely they're paying?" Which means, deep pockets to pick. "We're going to need two Herman Miller Aeron chairs, an Eames bookcase and occasional table, a desk from some eye-wateringly expensive Italian design studio, a genuine eighty-year-old Bonsai Californian redwood, an OC3 cable into Telehouse, and gaming laptops. Alienware: we need lots and lots of Alienware...."
Andy gives me five seconds to slaver over the fantasy before he pricks my balloon. "You'll take Dell and like it."
"Even if the bad guys frag us?" I try.
"They won't." He looks smug. "Because you're the best."
One of the advantages of being a cash-starved department is that nobody ever dares to throw anything away in case it turns out to be useful later. Another advantage is that there's ,never any money to get things done, like (for example) refit old offices to comply with current health and safety regulations.
It's cheaper just to move everybody out into a Portakabin in the car park and leave the office refurb for another financial year. At least, that's what they do in this day and age; thirty, forty years ago I don't know where they put the surplus bodies. Anyway, while Andy gets on the phone to Emma to plead for a budget, I lead Pete on a fishing expedition.
"This is the old segregation block," I explain, flicking on a light switch. "Don't come in here without a light or the grue will get you."
The Jennifer Morgue l-3 Page 35