“Oh.” There is silence on the line for a moment, during which the waiter—check shirt with buttoned collar, tidily barbered full-set beard/mustache, the ends of an intricate tattoo peeping out from his shirt-cuffs—plants a latte featuring a neatly drawn teddy-bear’s face in front of Alex, checks him out for signs of approval, and departs, disappointed. “Well, um. Are you going?”
“Mum said something about—” Something in Alex’s memory short-circuits and dredges a traitor phrase to the surface. “You have a friend? Mack? Are you bringing—”
“Yes, that’s why I was calling.” Now it’s Sarah’s turn to sound evasive. “I’m bringing Mack to dinner and, well, I was hoping you’d be around? You know how awkward it is, introducing—”
No I don’t. Alex cringes reflexively. “I guess so. Um. So you want backup. Right?”
“Right,” she says, a husky note of gratitude bubbling up.
“Oh my, this is serious, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, I guess we’re serious, you could say that.” A pause. “You were worried about Mum and Dad leaning on you, weren’t you? Are you seeing anyone, Alex?”
“N-no.” Somehow it’s easier to confess this personal failing to his kid sister. “Not right now. How long have you known Mack?”
“Oh, we met in fresher’s week, but we only got serious around the end of last year’s summer term.”
Alex does the numbers and his eyes bulge. “You’ve been hiding it from the folks for nearly a year?”
“Not hiding, exactly: I just didn’t know what Mum and Dad would make of . . . It’s different for boys.”
Alex takes a deep breath. As he does so, he spots the waiter returning, bearing an overflowing plate. “Food’s coming, got to go. You want me to run cover with the parents then? How about if we both aim to arrive around seven o’clock? That way we can split their attention.”
“Yes, that would be perfect! I’ll see you then! Thanks, Alex. You’re a champ.”
* * *
That evening, Alex is waiting in the car park after dark when a familiar white van noses in and the passenger door opens. “Wotcher mate!” Pinky is surprisingly bouncy for a middle-aged guy, Alex thinks. “Hop in, let’s go to see the wizard.”
This had better be worth it, Alex thinks as he clambers into the passenger seat. “If you could drop me in town afterwards, that’d be great. I’m pretty sure I can tell you if it’s going to work as soon as I’ve seen it.” Every week he spends in the hotel room, he’s bleeding the equivalent of a month’s rent in Leeds. (At least he’s still being paid a salary with a London weighting, which lessens the pain.) He’s already made up his mind to take the rooms unless there’s something badly wrong with the whole house-share. He can always move out after a month or three if he finds somewhere better. Can’t he?
There is a satnav on the dash, tucked away amidst a clutter of less mundane electronics, and Pinky makes extensive use of it as he hurls the van along some alarmingly steep backstreets and through commuter rat-runs plagued by a rash of sleeping policemen that rattle Alex’s teeth every time they jolt over one. As Pinky drives, Alex studies his co-worker. He’s in his late thirties or early forties, with shaven head and a slightly demonic goatee, like a younger Walter White. Alex gathers he’s something to do with R&D, or maybe field ops tech support—but sticking your nose in your co-workers’ business is strictly discouraged in the Laundry: loose lips don’t merely sink ships, they summon krakens with too many tentacles.
“How long have you known, uh, Mr. Brains?” Alex asks as they hurtle across a small roundabout and bounce over another speed bump. He’s trying to make conversation in a half-hearted effort to get to know/bond with a possible flatmate, but when you can’t discuss work and you don’t have a hobby there’s not much to talk about.
To his surprise, Pinky guffaws. “Long enough to know better!”
Oh, very helpful. Alex sinks back in his seat, irritated.
“Years ago we used to share a safe house with Bob Howard,” Pinky volunteers abruptly. “Since then we’ve gotten used to living together with nobody else around. But we don’t have time to sort out a mortgage and go house-hunting up here, and the market’s stagnant anyway, so we’re going back to renting for a year or two.”
Alex boggles slightly. He is not a fan of Mr. Howard. The first time they met, Bob tried to zap him with some kind of banishment taser. Subsequently he learned that it could have been a lot worse: Howard has heavy mojo in Ops, having trained under the semi-legendary Angleton, the Eater of Souls. According to the org chart Alex sneaked a peek at, Howard is a systems necromancer, whatever that means. Maybe he raises dead mainframes?
Pinky takes a few seconds to concentrate on a particularly ominous roundabout. “We wanted this house because there’s a decent cellar—we need space for Brains’s lab and my workshop.”
“Ah, right.” This is probably safe conversational territory, Alex decides, because Pinky raised it first. “What sort of stuff do you make at home?”
“Oh, hobbyist stuff: nothing classified. We got our wrists slapped for taking work home once too often so these days it’s just maker noodling. Lately, Brains made a 3D printer out of a TIG welder and I’ve been using it to repair—it’d be more accurate to say remanufacture—a half-track motorcycle Bob stole from a bunch of undead Nazis in Amsterdam.”
Alex’s brain shuts down. There are words coming out of Pinky’s mouth and they sound as if they ought to mean something but they don’t parse. “That’s interesting,” he says politely. Undead Nazis in Amsterdam?
“You ride a moped, don’t you? And the Vicar’s a biker. Maybe you’d like to test-drive it? We’ve got a two-seater hovercraft as well, but the house is on a hill so it’d be an all-around bad idea to take it out on the road, we’d never get it back up to the garage. Oh look, we’re nearly there.”
Pinky ushers Alex through a cramped porch bolted on the front of the house like an afterthought, into an asymmetric hallway with a staircase on one side and doors to the left and front leading into two reception rooms and a kitchen. The back room is cluttered along two walls with machine tools. Alex recognizes a lathe and a surprisingly professional 3D printer; a full-height equipment rack is stuffed with recondite electronics, and other, less familiar lab gear lies scattered around. The kitchen is at least a kitchen. There’s a wooden table, and a fridge, and a bunch of fitted units around a cooker. The central heating boiler bolted to one wall emits odd gurgling belches from time to time. It’s all slightly grubby, and Mum would have a fit if she saw him living in such squalor, but to his surprise Alex realizes that it feels comfortable: as if he could put his feet up on one of the chairs, or leave the boxes from last night’s takeaway out on the counter, without being told off. It is, in short, a man cave.
“Let me put the kettle on. Then I’ll show you around upstairs and out back, and we can talk about it over a cuppa.”
Opening off the first-floor landing are a toilet, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, one of which has been turned into a field-expedient server farm. (They don’t spend long there, for it is occupied by Brains. Alex has a confused impression of a pasty-skinned man with a shining, bald head and a mustache the size of a bog brush. He’s crawling around on his hands and knees with a bag of cable ties, muttering bitter imprecations about too-short ethernet cables. Evidently relying on wifi in a Laundry safe house is considered about as acceptable as walking around with your trousers at half-mast.) There’s also a mystery staircase which disappears into what was originally the attic.
“Some time back, the previous owners fitted dormers and turned the top floor into two bedrooms,” Pinky explains as Alex follows him up the steep and narrow stairs. Alex oohs and ahs appreciatively. “There are blackout blinds on the Velux skylight, and for now there’s a wardrobe in one room and a bookcase in the other that you can use to block the windows until you get curtains.”
Two whole bedrooms is more than Alex needs: he’ll be rattling around like a pea in a walnut shell. On the other hand, after living in student digs in Oxford and then rented rooms in London, the idea of having so much space to himself—and so cheap!—seems like an indecent luxury.
Alex follows Pinky back down to the kitchen, where Brains has migrated. He’s busy filling some sort of alarmingly teapot-esque contraption with freshly boiled water: at least, Alex thinks it’s a teapot. It could be a prototype Vohlman-Stephenson soul reactor, for all he knows. Certainly the intricate occult circuitry sketched on the outside of it looks alarmingly functional. “You said there was something out back to look at,” he says diffidently.
Pinky nods and bounces up and down on his toes. “Yes! There’s a garage, but you can’t park in it. The van and bikes go out front because we’re using the garage as a repair shop.”
“Repair—”
“Give me a countdown,” Brains demands abruptly, as he lowers the lid on the teapot. “Ninety seconds to initiation!”
Pinky sighs theatrically and pulls out an antique stopwatch. “This is which test number, dearie?”
“Isolation teapot model three, test eighteen.” Brains sounds pessimistic.
“He’s been working on this one for absolutely years,” Pinky confides; “he has a long-term obsession with extreme kitchenware. You know how isolation grids are useful for temporal containment as well as spatial isolation? He’s convinced it’s the perfect way to keep the tea from stewing, if only he can just get it right . . .”
Pentacles. Alex shudders slightly. Yes, you can use a properly energized grid to keep out tentacle monsters, or to keep them in if you’re deranged enough to think summoning them is a good idea—and you can use them to isolate the contents from the rest of spacetime, either for a really airtight conferencing suite, or as a kind of occult fridge (because you’re a psychotic vampire elder who doesn’t want your V-parasites to chow down on your prey too fast) . . . but any way you cut it, Alex has never heard of a use for a summoning/containment grid that gave him the warm fuzzies. Building one into a teapot feels just a little bit too close to lighting your campfire by burning crumbs of C-4 explosive.
“What’s in the garage?” Alex asks, hoping Pinky will extricate him from the kitchen before Brains’s brew is complete.
“Let me show you. This way.” Pinky unlocks the back door and starts down the steep brick steps that lead into an unkempt back garden that seems to be mostly occupied by a slowly crumbling shed and a flat-roofed garage.
“Hey, my countdown!”
“Time’s up,” Pinky calls. Alex hurries after him. “Don’t worry about the teapot,” Pinky assures him, “Brains does this sort of thing for a living. Safe as houses, really, as long as he doesn’t forget to earth the grounding strap again.” They reach the side-door to the garage. Pinky unlocks it, lets Alex in, then flips the light switch. “Behold, the chariot of the gods! Or rather, the Ahnenerbe-SS. We’ve been hauling it around for over a decade, and it’s nearly ready to ride again.”
There is a four-wheeled trailer in the garage, with a vehicle parked atop it. At first, Alex can’t make head or tail of what he’s looking at. He can’t even tell which direction it’s supposed to face. It resembles a cast-iron bathtub, if bathtubs had caterpillar tracks and the front forks of a motorbike bolted to the end where the water spigot belongs. A bench seat spans the back of the vehicle, going by the location of the bike handlebars; inside the tub there’s an old-school saddle, and between the saddle and the bench seat there’s— “Is that a radiator cover?”
“Yup, it got pretty cold on the Russian Front in 1943. Nothing like as cold as it got on the ground in OGRE REALITY, mind you, which is where Bob found it. The original engine’s by Opel, a 1.5-liter water-cooled four-cylinder job that puts out about 36 horsepower, but it was seized when we got it—vacuum welding, not to mention differential thermal contraction when the atmosphere froze during the Fimbulwinter.”
Pinky walks around the trailer, idly running a finger along the rim of the bizarre vehicle. “I did a lot of welding on the hull and replaced most of the track pins, Brains rebuilt the transmission, then we completely replaced the wiring loom and dropped in an engine from a Volkswagen Polo.” He gestures theatrically: “Behold: the world’s smallest half-track, and only the fourth Kettenkrad in the UK! Plan is to get it roadworthy, then use it to haul the hovercraft around on a trailer. It’s technically a classic, so it’s exempt from road tax—although you need a special license endorsement for tracked vehicles to drive it on the highways.” His gesture finishes in a flourish as he points at the rear wall of the garage, where something that looks like a leaf-blower humping an outboard motor boat leans against the wall.
Alex closes his eyes, then opens them slowly again. There are no windows in the garage, and plenty of cobwebby dark corners. There is even an inspection trench in the floor, between the trailer’s wheels. Not that he’s going to need it—or have room to stash his moped in here—but it’s nice to know there’s somewhere to take shelter if the teapot explodes.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ve seen enough.” He pauses with a hand on the door. “About the rooms. I don’t need two bedrooms to myself, but I’ve got a colleague who has a family down south—he probably won’t be moving up here full-time, but he can certainly use a room for the night when he’s in town. If you’re okay with the idea of me occasionally parking a friend in the other attic bedroom, I think we can do a deal.”
“Sure!” Pinky says brightly. “Let’s go back inside. I’m pretty sure the tea should be brewed by now, and we can hammer out the details over a cuppa.” His expression turns to one of worry. “Assuming this time he’s managed to keep the teapot haunting-free . . .”
* * *
DEAR DIARY:
I have come to an agreement to rent the top floor of the house off Harehills Lane for six months. I’m getting it semi-furnished for five hundred a month, plus my share of the council tax and bills. Pinky and Brains have already got a BT Infinity connection, and I’m getting to share it, so I will have internet access. It’s going to be secured as a class B safe house as soon as we’re all listed as living there by Human Resources, which means we get wards installed by Facilities and a secure landline. Also an intruder alarm. I emailed Pete and he’s interested in using the spare top room when he’s in town overnight. P & B want to meet him but they’re okay with this arrangement in principle because he has already been vetted by HR.
I have some minor reservations, and I may not be staying there after the first six months, because something about P & B smells funny.
I don’t care that they’re civil partners: that’s none of my business. Nor do I mind them keeping a hovercraft and a half-track in the garage and a lathe in the living room: that’s pretty normal for a geek house. But something doesn’t quite ring true. They work in tech support ops, Q Branch, playing with exotic toys, and they know about PHANG syndrome. That’s really quite hardcore, when you think about it. They’ve been in the organization for more than fifteen years—Pinky said in passing that they used to share a house with Mr. Howard and Mhari Murphy. That’s time to accrue quite a lot of seniority. So what are they doing in Leeds, rather than down in one of our research sites in Milton Keynes or Oxford?
I’m sure there’s a story behind it, but it’s a bad idea to ask questions. I guess I should just check with HR before I sign that contract and hand over the deposit and the first month’s rent. I’ll do it tomorrow.
Hmm. While I’m on the topic of Human Resources . . .
HR have given me a Story. I’m required to roll it out if anyone asks what I’ve been doing, including the parents. I’m not allowed to tell them The Truth, on pain of spontaneous human combustion. (At least, it would be spontaneous human combustion if I wasn’t a PHANG. In my case, it’s on pain of a black mark on my personnel record, because the standard formula for geases doesn’t w
ork very well on us.) Unfortunately the cover story they gave me is very badly constructed. I’ve requested a better one—one that won’t get me disinherited, at any rate—and Mr. Jenkins said he’d work on putting together a package, but I could tell from his expression that it’s a low priority.
This is what I’m supposed to tell people if they start digging into my background and occupation:
I am Alex Schwartz, PhD in mathematics, University College Oxford. I was headhunted from university by a certain bank, but my entire team was downsized in a round of cost-cutting following the parent institution’s indictment over the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal. Not my fault, not my team’s fault, but the bank had to make adjustments to its overhead to deal with the scale of the fine they got landed with. The bonuses we were due at the end of the year made us a fat target, and after our unit’s head, Oscar Menendez, was murdered by a drug dealer in Essex, we had nobody to defend us from a spurious stack-ranking exercise . . .
I’m not bitter. Okay?
Actually, about half of that story is true. The bits that aren’t: Oscar was murdered by a crazed vampire hunter who happened to be a catspaw working for the incredibly ancient vampire elder who actually owned the bank. Said elder died, but not before he was maneuvered into making a spectacularly lethal raid on the New Annex by his rival for the title of vampire elder of London. Oh, and my team were downsized because we’d already been recruited by the Laundry—thank you, Ms. Murphy, for saving our collective ass—and someone on Mahogany Row had a quiet word with someone senior at the bank before our annual bonus came through, dammit.
Back to the cover story:
Banking having proven to be a suboptimal career choice (on top of requiring me to work fourteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week), I was invited to attend a recruitment open day held by the Civil Service. They decided that I was a good fit for their needs and hired me on—
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