The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  “Next round.” The banker glances round. Again, I can’t stop myself, even though there’s a cold itch at the base of my spine and my wards are ringing like alarm bells. I slide another ten thousand forwards. This time I twitch and nearly scatter the stack everywhere. McMurray spares me a coldly amused glance; then the banker holds up the shoe and the card deck and begins to deal. There’s something very wrong here, I tell myself. But it’s no compulsion or geas I’m familiar with. There’s a pattern to it, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Where’s Ramona? I can sense nothing but velvety darkness where she ought to be. I’m alone in my own head for the first time in days, and it’s not a good feeling. Cards. Queen of diamonds, eight of spades—

  A stack of chips approaches me across the table. I pick up my glass and throw back the tequila slammer, shuddering as it hits my throat. I feel out-of-control drunk and coldly sober at the same time: it’s like my brain’s trying to do the splits, its lobes skittering in opposite directions.

  “Again, anyone?” asks the banker, looking round the table. I mechanically begin to push my chips forwards, then manage to divert the action, bend down, and twist the heel of my left shoe. Coming up above the level of the table I finish the motion before I can stop myself, all my chips gliding into a pile in front of the banker. He deals. I look around the room. McMurray’s earring is a burning cold teardrop of radium fire. The shadows lengthen behind the drapes, hiding the screams of trapped tree spirits embedded in the fine wall paneling. The Tillinghast resonator is humming along, but when I look at the toad he’s just an ordinary retired fat-cat with a trust fund and a big bank account, enjoying his gambling habit. The same isn’t true of the vultures—I look at them and try not to recoil. Instead of aging former trophy-wives and heiresses I see hollow bags of translucent skin and hair held together by their clothes, hunched over their cards like blood-sucking parasites waiting to be filled.

  “Hold or play?” someone asks. I glance at the guy in the white suit and open-necked shirt and see a half-decayed cadaver grinning at me from behind his cards, skin peeling back from dark hollows lined with strips of adipocere: the effect of the resonator reaches my nasal sinuses and I smell him as well. The supermodel on his arm looks exactly the same as before, inhumanly calm and poised as she leans against him, but the shadows behind her are thick and fuliginous, and something about her expression makes me think of a hangman waiting proudly beside his latest client as the warden signs the death certificate.

  “Play.” I try hard not to gag as I turn my cards over. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The croupier is raking the chips across to the toad. “Excuse me,” I gasp, pushing my chair back from the table. I stumble towards the discreet side door, my throat burning as the woodwork screams at me and hollow bags of skin turn their empty faces to follow my trajectory to the toilets.

  I just lost twenty thousand bucks, I realize numbly as I splash water on my face and look at myself in the mirror above the wash basin. My face in the mirror leers at me and winks. I lift my leg hastily and twist the heel back into place: the face freezes in shock. I can’t afford that. Ghastly visions dance in my mind’s eye: Angleton will call the Auditors on me, Mo will scream blue murder. It’s more than our combined savings account, the money we’ve been socking away this past year towards a deposit on a house. I shudder. My lips are numb from the alcohol I’ve been putting away. My throat and stomach feel raw. I still can’t sense Ramona, and that’s critical: if she’s out of touch we’ve got a real problem with the whole operation. Pull yourself together, I tell the man in the mirror. He nods at me, looking shaken. What to do first? McMurray: The bastard set me up somehow, didn’t he?

  The realization gives me something concrete to focus on: I straighten up, carefully check out the stranger in the mirror to make sure he looks suitably composed, square my shoulders, and head back towards the party. But when I reach the door back to the room, I pause. The baccarat game is over. Everyone except the bank-toad is standing up, and new players are milling around their seats, buzzing like a swarm of flies around a—don’t go there. I look away hastily, my eyes watering. I don’t see McMurray anywhere, and my wards are kicking up a fuss. It feels like a major supernatural manifestation is happening somewhere nearby.

  “You must be Mr. Howard?” a calm, somewhat musical voice says from right beside me.

  I don’t jump out of my skin this time: I barely twitch. The urgent nagging of my wards spikes in time with her voice. “Everyone seems to know who I am. Who are you?”

  Looking round I recognize her at once. She’s the supermodel type with the hangman’s eyes who was chilling with Mr. Stiffy: she’s got skin the color of a perfect mocha, her dancer’s body exposed rather than concealed by her sheer white gown, a fortune in sapphires at ears and throat. Looks to die for, like Ramona—yes, it’s a glamour. Predictably, she’s the center of the manifestation my wards are yammering about. “I’m Johanna, Mr. Howard, Johanna Todt. I work for the Billingtons.”

  I shrug. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  It’s meant to be a black joke, but Johanna doesn’t seem to take it in the intended spirit. She frowns: “Not yet.” Then she sniffs dismissively. “I’m supposed to bring you to see him.”

  “Really.” I make myself look her in the eye. She really is beautiful, so much so that normally I’d be tongue-tied and babbling in her presence. But thanks to the time I’ve been spending with Ramona, supernatural beauty isn’t as dazzling as it used to be, and besides, I’ve got other preoccupations right now. I manage to keep a lid on it. “Liza Sloat just got through warning me off, then I had some security consultant called McMurray all over me like a vest. What’s the story?”

  “Interdepartmental rivalry. Sloat and McMurray don’t get on.” Johanna tilts her head to one side and looks at me. “There are many mansions in the house of Billington, Mr. Howard. And as it happens, Mr. McMurray is my manager.” She lays a long-fingered hand on my arm. “Walk with me.”

  She steers me past the bar and into the outer room, past the jazz butchers. There are French doors open on the balcony. Where’s Ramona? I worry. She wasn’t in the back room; she’s not here . . .

  “For obvious reasons we don’t make it too easy to reach the chief,” Johanna murmurs. “When you’re as rich as the Billingtons it makes you a target. Money is an attractive nuisance. We’re currently tracking six stalkers and three blackmailers, and that’s before you count the third-world governments. We’ve got enough schizophrenics to fill one-point-four psychiatric hospitals, plus an average of two-point-six marriage proposals and eleven-point-one death threats per week, and a federal antitrust investigation which is worse than all of them combined.”

  Put that way, I can almost feel a sneaking sympathy for the man. “So why am I here?” I ask.

  The ghost of a smile tugs at her lips. “You’re not a stalker or a blackmailer.” A faint ghost of a breeze comes through the open doors. She leads me out onto the balcony. “You’re asking inconvenient questions and silencing you won’t stop them, because the organization you work for is staffed by determined, intelligent, and very dangerous people. It’s much better to get everything out in the open and discuss it like sensible people, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, well.” My mind’s eye flickers back to the nightmare meeting in Darmstadt, the shadow of a diver’s oxygen tank rippling across encrusted concrete . . . Dammit, where’s Ramona? She should be relaying this! “Incidentally, who was your boyfriend?” She raises an eyebrow. “Humor me. The guy in the white suit.”

  “What, him?” She shakes her head. “Just an ex of mine. He hangs out with me sometimes.” My wards are still tingling and I get a sharp stab of pain as I look at her. Her smile slowly widens. “I walk the body—one at a time. Not all of us are as snobbish as prissy Miss Random.”

  I used to wonder why the most beautiful women always ended up with rotters, but as explanations go this one stinks. I try to take a step back but she’s still holding my arm and she’s got a grip like a s
teel mooring cable, and I’m backed up against the wall. My wards are flaring now, incandescent spectral light from the chain I’m wearing under my shirt. “What have you done with her?” I demand.

  “Nothing, personally. But if you want to see her again you’ll come with—”

  The velvet wall between us rips open shockingly fast, and Ramona comes slamming through. I’m not sensing the shape of her emotions, or even seeing a blurry inner vision through her eyes, I’m inside her, I am Ramona for a random moment, and the somatic realization is simultaneously very wrong and very right. The floor beneath her feet is carpeted but it’s slowly turning. Unsteady on her heels she looks round the gloriously upholstered salon, past the windows, sees the sea and the headland. Three black-clad guards with guns flank a monster just like the corpse in the white suit as her heart tries to climb her throat. ★★Bob?★★ Her cold apprehension hits me like a hammer. This isn’t random fear of the unknown: she knows precisely what she’s afraid of. I follow her gaze down to the floor, and the carpet she stands on. It’s a glorious antique Isfahan carpet. Woven into it, almost invisible silver threads trace out a design identical to the one on my wards, on McMurray’s earring. From one edge of the carpet a coiled cable leads to a control box grasped in the walking corpse’s hands. ★★It’s a trap, Bob, don’t let them—★★

  The corpse pushes a button on the control box and suddenly I can’t feel Ramona anymore. I stagger, disoriented: it’s like having a full-body local anesthetic. I blink until I can focus my eyes. Johanna is smiling at me in a satisfied, cat-got-the-canary manner. “Who do you work for again?” I ask, trying to regain control.

  “Ellis Billington.” Her smile vanishes, replaced by casual authority. “He says I’m to take you aboard the Mabuse. You will do exactly as I say—assuming you ever want to see her again.”

  “What?” I ask, feeling sick and sober with the backwash from Ramona’s fright. “But I came here to see him anyway!”

  “Perhaps, but you’ve also acquired adversary status, according to our reading of the main security geas. It’s probably a memory leak in the code, but until we’ve terminated this phase of the operation we’re going to treat you as threat number one.” She steps closer to me and before I realize what she’s doing she reaches into my jacket and removes the pistol Ramona made me wear. She takes two steps back and I find myself staring up the muzzle of my own gun, feeling stupid. “Lights out, Mr. Howard.”

  I’m opening my mouth to say something when the ward they’ve trapped Ramona in shuts down and her presence floods into me again. I’ve got time for a brief moment of relief—time to think We’re whole again—then the walking corpse shoots her with a Taser, and while Ramona and I are both flopping around on the floor Johanna steps forwards and sinks a disposable syringe into my neck.

  11.

  DESTINY ENTANGLED

  I AM ASLEEP AND DREAMING AND AWARE AT THE same time—I appear to be having a lucid dream. I really wish I wasn’t, because that rat bastard Angleton has taken advantage of my somnambulant state to sneak into my head with his slide projector and install another pre-canned top secret briefing, using my eyelids as stereoscopic projection screens. And I don’t care how bad your nightmares are, they can’t possibly be as unpleasant as a mission briefing conducted by old skull-face while you’re asleep, unable to wake up, and suffering from an impending hangover.

  “Pay attention, Bob,” he admonishes me sternly. “If you’re alive, you’re getting this briefing because you’ve penetrated Billington’s semiotic firewall. This means you’re approaching the most dangerous part of your mission—and you’re going to have to play it by ear. On the other hand, you’ve got an ace up your sleeve in the form of Ms. Random. She should be secure in the safe house your backup team has organized, and she’ll be your conduit back to us for advice and instructions.”

  No she bloody isn’t! I try to yell at him, but he’s playing the usual tricks with my vocal chords and I’m not allowed to say anything that isn’t on the menu. Propelled by the usual inexorable dream logic, the briefing continues.

  “Billington has let it be known that he will be conducting an advance Dutch auction for the specimens he expects to raise from JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two. These are described in vague but exciting terms, as chthonic artifacts and applications. There is of course no mention of his expertise in operating Gravedust-type oneiromantic convolution engines, or of the presence of a deceased DEEP SEVEN in the vicinity.

  “He is restricting bidding to authorized representatives of governments with seats at the G8, plus Brazil, China, and India. Sealed bids are solicited in advance of the operation, which will be honored once the retrieval is complete. This indirect pressure makes it difficult for us to stay out of the auction, while simultaneously rendering it nearly impossible for us to take direct action against him—he’s very carefully played the bidders off against one another. Of rather more concern is who Billington hasn’t invited to bid—namely BLUE HADES. As I mentioned in your earlier briefing, our immediate concern is the response of BLUE HADES to Billington’s activities around the site, followed in turn by what Billington really intends to do with the raised artifacts.

  “Regardless, your actual task remains, as briefed, to determine what Billington is planning and to stop him from doing anything that arouses BLUE HADES or DEEP SEVEN—especially, anything likely to convince them that we’re in violation of our treaty obligations. To supplement your cover you are officially designated as an authorized representative of Her Majesty’s Government, to deliver our bid for the JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two artifacts. This is a genuine bid, although obviously we hope we won’t be called upon to make good on it, and the terms are as follows: for an exclusive usage license as designated in schedule one to be appended to this document, hereinafter designated ‘the contract’ between the seller ‘Ellis Billington’ and associates, corporations, and other affiliates and the purchaser, the Government of the United Kingdom, the sum of two billion pounds sterling, to be paid . . .”

  Angleton rattles on in dreary legalese for approximately three lifetimes. It’d be tedious at the best of times, but right now it’s positively nightmarish; the plan has already run off the rails, and the worst thing of all is, I can’t even yell at him. I’m committing this goddamn contract that we’re never going to use to memory, seemingly at Angleton’s posthypnotic command, but the shit has hit the fan and Ramona’s a prisoner. I’d gnash my teeth if I was allowed to. I’ve got a feeling that Angleton’s sneak strategy—use me to leak disinformation to the Black Chamber via Ramona, of course—is already blown, because I don’t think Billington is serious about running an auction. If he was, would he be dicking around risking a murder investigation in order to push a line of cosmetics? And would he be kidnapping negotiators? This is all so out of whack that I can’t figure it out. I’ve got a sick feeling that Angleton’s scheme was toast before I even boarded the airbus in Paris: if nothing else, his bid is implausibly low given what’s at stake.

  Eventually the briefing lets go of me and I slide gratefully beneath the surface of a dreamless lake. I’m rocking from side to side on it, with the leisurely wobble of a howdah perched on an elephant’s back. After a brief infinity of unconsciousness I become aware that my head is throbbing fiercely and my mouth feels like a family of rodents has set up a campsite, complete with latrine, on my tongue. And that I’m awake. Oh no. I twitch, taking stock. I’m lying on my back which is never the right place to be, breathing through my mouth, and—

  “He’s awake.”

  “Good. Howard, stop fooling around.”

  This time I groan aloud. My eyes feel like pickled onions and it takes a real effort to force them open. More facts flood in as my brain reboots. I’m lying on my back, fully dressed, on something like a padded bench or sofa. The voice I recognize: it’s McMurray. The room’s well lit, and I notice that the padded surface beneath me is covered in beautifully finished fabric. The lights are tasteful and indirect, and the curving wall
s are paneled in old mahogany: the local police cells, it ain’t. “Give me a second,” I mumble.

  “Sit up.” He doesn’t sound impatient; just sure of himself.

  I force arms and legs that are heavy and warm from too-recent sleep to respond, swinging my legs round and sitting up at the same time. A wave of dizziness nearly pushes me right back down, but I get over it and rub my eyes, blinking. “What is this place?” I ask shakily. And where’s Ramona? Still trapped?

  McMurray sits down on the bench opposite me. Actually, it’s a continuation of the one I was lying on—it snakes around the exterior of the trapezoid room, past out-tilting walls and a doorway in the middle of the only rectilinear wall in the cabin. It’s a nice room, except that the doorway is blocked by a gorilla in a uniform-like black jumpsuit and beret, plus mirrorshades. (Which is more than somewhat incongruous, in view of it being well past midnight.) The windows are small and oval with neatly decorated but very functional-looking metal covers hinged back from them, and there are drawers set in the base of the padded bench—obviously storage of some kind. The throbbing isn’t in my head; it’s coming from under the floor. Which can only mean one thing.

  “Welcome aboard the Mabuse,” he says, then shrugs apologetically. “I’m sorry about the way you were handed your boarding pass: Johanna isn’t exactly Little Miss Subtlety, and I told her to make sure you didn’t abscond. That would totally ruin the plot.”

  I rub my head and groan. “Did you have to—no, don’t answer that, let me guess: it’s a tradition or an old charter, something like that.” I continue to rub my head. “Is there any chance of a glass of water? And a bathroom?” It’s not just a barbiturate hangover—the martinis are extracting a vicious revenge. “If you’re going to take me to see the big cheese shouldn’t I freshen up a bit first?” Please say yes, I pray to whatever god of whimsy has got me in his grip; being hungover is bad enough without a beating on top of it.