The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  For a moment I wonder if I’ve gone too far, but he gestures at the gorilla, who turns and opens the door and retreats down the narrow corridor a couple of paces. “The head’s next door. You have five minutes.”

  He watches as I stumble to my feet. He nods, affably enough, and gestures at another door set next to the rec room or wherever the hell it is they’d put me in to sleep things off. I open the door and indeed find a washroom of sorts, barely bigger than an airliner’s toilet but beautifully finished. I take a leak, gulp down half a pint or so of water using the plastic cup so helpfully provided, then spend about a minute sitting down and trying not to throw up. ★★Ramona, are you there?★★ If she is, I can’t hear her. I take stock: my phone’s missing, as is my neck-chain ward, my wristwatch, and my shoulder holster. The bow tie is dangling from my collar, but they weren’t considerate enough to remove my uncomfortable toe-pinching shoes. I raise an eyebrow at the guy in the mirror and he pulls a mournful face and shrugs: no help there. So I wash my face, try to comb my hair with my fingertips, and go back outside to face the music.

  The gorilla is waiting for me outside. McMurray stands in front of the closed door to the rec room. The gorilla beckons to me then turns and marches down the corridor, so I play nice and tag along, with McMurray taking up the rear. The corridor is punctuated by frequent watertight bulkheads with annoying lintels to step over, and there’s a shortage of portholes to show where we are: someone’s obviously done a first-rate coach-building job, but this ship wasn’t built as a yacht and its new owner clearly places damage control ahead of aesthetics. We pass some doors, ascend a very steep staircase, and then I figure we’re into Owner Territory because the metal decking gives way to teak parquet and hand-woven carpets, and up here they have widened the corridors to accommodate the fat cats: or maybe it’s just that they built the owner’s quarters where they used to stash the Klub-N cruise missiles and the magazine for the forward 100mm gun turret.

  Klub-N vertical launch cells are not small, and the owner’s lounge is about three meters longer than my entire house. It appears to be wallpapered in cloth-of-gold, which for the most part is mercifully concealed behind ninety-centimeter Sony displays wearing priceless antique picture frames. Right now they’re all switched off, or displaying a rolling screensaver depicting the TLA Corporation logo. The furniture’s equally lacking in the taste department. There’s a sofa that probably escaped from Versailles one jump ahead of the revolutionary fashion police, a bookcase full of self-help business titles (A Defendant’s Guide to the International Criminal Court, The Twelve-Step Sociopath, Globalization for Asset-Strippers), and an antique sideboard that abjectly fails to put the rock into baroque. I find myself looking for a furtive cheap print of dogs playing poker or a sad-eyed clown—anything to break the monotony of the collision between bad taste and serious money.

  Then I notice the Desk.

  Desks are to executives what souped-up Mitsubishi Colts with low-profile alloys, metal-flake paint jobs, and extra-loud, chrome-plated exhaust pipes are to chavs; they’re a big swinging dick, the proxy they use to proclaim their sense of self-importance. If you want to understand an executive, you study his desk. Billington’s Desk demands a capital letter. Like a medieval monarch’s throne, it is designed to proclaim to the poor souls who are called before it: The owner of this piece of furniture is above you. Someday I’ll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let’s just say this example is screaming “megalomaniac!” at me.

  Billington may have an ego the size of an aircraft carrier but he’s not so vain as to leave his desk empty (that would mean he was pretending to lead a life of leisure) or to cover it with meaningless gewgaws (indicative of clownish triviality). This is the desk of a serious executive. There’s a functional-looking (watch me work!) PC to one side, and a phone and a halogen desk light at the other. One of the other items dotting it gives me a nasty shock when I recognize the design inscribed on it: millions wouldn’t, but the owner of this hunk of furniture is using a Belphegor-Mandelbrot Type Two containment matrix as a mouse mat, which makes him either a highly skilled adept or a suicidal maniac. Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He’s not ashamed of boasting about it—he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry.

  McMurray gestures me to halt on the carpet in front of the Desk. “Wait here, the boss will be along in a minute.” He gestures at a skeletal contraption of chromed steel and thin, black leather that only Le Corbusier could have mistaken for a chair: “Have a seat.”

  I sit down gingerly, half-expecting steel restraints to flash out from concealed compartments and lock around my wrists. My head aches and I feel hot and shivery. I glance at McMurray, trying for casual rather than anxious. The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one’s self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer’s yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty. “Where’s Ramona?” I ask.

  “I don’t remember saying you were free to ask questions.” He stares at me from behind his steel-rimmed spectacles until icicles form on the back of my neck. “Ellis has a specific requirement for an individual of her . . . type. I’m a specialist in managing such entities.” A pause. “While you remain entangled, she will be manageable. And as long as she remains manageable, there will be no need to dispose of her.”

  I swallow. My tongue is dry and I can hear my pulse in my ears. This wasn’t supposed to happen; she was supposed to be back in the safe house, acting as a relay! McMurray nods at me knowingly. “Don’t underestimate your own usefulness to us, Mr. Howard,” he says. “You’re not just a useful lever.” There’s a discreet buzz from his belt pager: “Mr. Billington is on his way now.”

  The door behind the Desk opens.

  “Ah, Mr. B—Howard.” Billington walks in and plants himself firmly down on the black carbon-fiber Aeron chair behind the Desk. From the set of his shoulders and the tiny smile playing around his lips he’s in an expansive mood. “I’m so pleased you could be here this evening. I gather my wife’s party wasn’t entirely to your taste?”

  I stare at him. He’s an affable, self-satisfied bastard in a dinner jacket and for a moment I feel a nearly uncontrollable urge to punch him in the face. I manage to hold it in check: the gorilla behind me will ensure I’d only get one chance, and the consequences would hurt Ramona as much as they’d hurt me. Still, it’s a tempting thought. “I have a bid for your auction,” I say, very carefully keeping my face straight. “This abduction was unnecessary, and may cause my employers to reconsider their very generous offer.”

  Billington laughs. Actually, it’s more of a titter, high-pitched and unnerving. “Come now, Mr. Howard! Do you really think I don’t already know about your boss’s paltry little two-billion-pound baitworm? Please! I’m not stupid. I know all about you and your colleague Ms. Random, and the surveillance team in the safe house run by Jack Griffin. I even remember your boss, James, from back before he became quite so spectral and elevated. I know much more than you give me credit for.” He pauses. “In fact, I know everything. ”

  Whoops. If he’s telling the truth, that would put a very bad complexion on things. “Then what am I doing here?” I ask, hoping like hell that he’s bluffing. “I mean, if you’re omnipotent and omniscient then just what is the point of abducting me—not to mention Ramona—and dragging us aboard your yacht?” (That’s a guess about Ramona, but I don’t see where else he might be keeping her.) “Don’t tell me you haven’t got better things to do with your time than gloat; you’re trying to close a multi-billion-dollar auction, aren’t you?” He just looks at me with those peculiar, slotted lizard eyes, and I have a sudden cold conviction that maybe making money is the last thing on his mind right now.

  “You’re here for several reasons
,” he says, quite agreeably. “Hair of the dog?” He raises an eyebrow, and the gorilla hurries over to the sideboard.

  “I wouldn’t mind a glass of water,” I confess.

  “Hah.” He nods to himself. “The archetype hasn’t taken full effect yet, I see.”

  “Which archetype?”

  McMurray clears his throat. “Boss, do I need to know this?”

  Billington casts him a fish-eyed stare: “No, I don’t think you do. Quick thinking.”

  “I’ll just go and check in on Ramona then, shall I? Then I’ll go polish the binnacle and check for frigging in the rigging or something.” McMurray slithers out through the door at high speed. Billington nods thoughtfully.

  “He’s a smart subordinate.” He raises an eyebrow at me. “That’s half the problem, you know.”

  “Half what problem?”

  “The problem of running a tight ship.” The gorilla hands Billington a glass of whisky, then plants a glassful of mineral water in front of me before returning to his position by the door. “If they’re smart enough to be useful they get ideas about making themselves indispensable—ideas about getting above their station, as you Brits would put it. If they’re too dumb to be useful they’re a drain on your management time. All corporations are an economy of attention, from the top down. You should take McMurray as a role model, Mr. Howard, if you ever make it back to your petty little civil service cubicle farm. He’s a consummate senior field agent and a huge asset to his employers. No manager in their right mind would ever terminate him, but because he likes field-work he doesn’t spend enough time in the office to get a leg up the promotion ladder. And he knows it.” He falls silent. I take advantage of the break in his spiel to take a mouthful of water. “That’s why I headhunted him away from the Black Chamber,” Billington adds.

  When I finish coughing, he looks at me thoughtfully. “You strike me as being a reasonably adaptable, intelligent young man. It’s really a shame you’re working for the public sector. Are you sure I can’t bribe you? How would a million bucks in a numbered account in the Caymans suit you?”

  “Get lost.” I struggle to maintain my composure.

  “If it’s just that silly little warrant card you guys carry, we can do something about it,” he adds slyly.

  Ouch. That’s a low blow. I take a deep breath: “I’m sure you can, but—”

  He snorts. And looks amused. “It’s to be expected. They wouldn’t have sent you if they thought you had an easy price. It’s not just money I can offer, Mr. Howard. You’re used to working for an organization that is deliberately structured to stifle innovation and obstruct stakeholder-led change. My requirements are a bit, shall we say, different. A smart, talented, hard-working man—especially a morally flexible one—can go far. How would you like to come on board as deputy vice-president for intelligence, Europe, Middle East, and Africa division? A learning sinecure, initially, but with your experience and background in one of the world’s leading occult espionage organizations I’m sure you’d make your mark soon enough.”

  I give it a moment’s thought, long enough to realize that he’s right—and that I’m not going to take the offer. He’s offering me crumbs from the rich man’s table, and not even bothering to find out in advance if that’s the sort of diet I enjoy. Which means he’s doing me the compliment of not taking the prospect of my defection seriously, which means he considers me to be a reliable agent. And now I stop to think about it, I realize to my surprise that I am. I may not be happy about the circumstances under which I took the oath, and I may gripe and moan about the pay and conditions, but there’s a big difference between pissing and moaning and seriously contemplating the betrayal of everything I want to preserve. Even if I’ve only just come to realize it.

  “I’m not for sale, Ellis. Not for any price you can pay, anyway. What’s this archetype business?”

  He nods minutely, examining me as if I’ve just passed some sort of important test. “I was getting to that.” He rotates his chair until he’s half-facing the big monitor off to my right. He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there’s much difference.) For a moment I almost begin to relax, but then I recognize what he’s calling up and my stomach flip-flops in abject horror.

  “I do everything in PowerPoint, you know.” Billington grins, an expression which I’m sure is intended to be impish but that comes across to his intended victim—me—as just plain vicious. “I had to have my staff write some extra plug-ins to make it do everything I need, but, ah, here we are . . .”

  He rapidly flips through a stack of tediously bulleted talking points until he wipes into a screen that’s mercifully photographic in nature. It’s a factory, lots of workers in gowns and masks gathered around worktops and stainless steel equipment positioned next to a series of metal vats.

  “Eileen’s Hangzhou factory, where our Pale Grace™ Skin Hydromax® range of products are made. As you probably already figured out, we apply a transference-contagion glamour to the particulate binding agent in the foundation powder, maintained by brute force from our headquarters operation in Milan, Italy. Unlike most of the cosmetics on the market, it really does render the wrinkles invisible. The ingredients are a bit of a pain, but she’s got that well in hand; instead of needing an endless supply of young women just to keep one old bat pretty, we can make do with only about ten parts per million of maid’s blood in the mix. It’s just one of the wonders of modern stem cell technology. Shame we can’t find a replacement for the stress prostaglandins, but those are the breaks.”

  He clicks his mouse. “Here’s the other end of the operation.” It’s a roomful of skinny, suntanned guys in short-sleeved shirts hunched over cheap PCs, row upon row of them: “My floating offshore programmer ranch, the SS Hopper. You’ve probably read about it, haven’t you? Instead of offshoring to Bangalore, I bought an old liner, wired it, and flew in a number of Indian programmers to live on board. It stays outside the coastal limit and with satellite uplinks it might as well be in downtown Miami. Only they’re not, um, actually programming anything. Instead, they’re monitoring the surveillance take from the mascara. Because the Pale Grace™ Bright Eyes® products don’t just link into the transference-contagion glamour, they contain particles nano-engraved with an Icon of Bhaal-She’vra that backdoors them into my surveillance grid. That’s actually the main product of my sixty-nanometer fab line these days, by the way, not the bespoke microprocessors everyone thinks it makes. It’s a very useful similarity hack—anything the wearer can see or hear, my monitors can pick up, and we’ve got flexible batch manufacturing protocols that ensure every single cosmetics product is uniquely coded so we can tell them apart. It’s almost embarrassing how much intelligence you can gather from this sweep, especially as Eileen’s affiliates are running a loyalty scheme that encourages users to register their identity with us at time of sale for free samples, so that we know who they are.”

  I’m boggling already. “Are you telling me you’ve turned your cosmetics company into some kind of occult ubiquitous surveillance operation? Is that what this is?”

  “Yup, that’s about the size of it.” Billington nods smugly. “Of course, it’s expensive—but we manage to just about break even on a twenty buck tube of mascara, so it works out all right in the end. And it’s less obvious than using several million zombie seabirds.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, that’s by way of demonstrating to you that you can run, but you can’t hide. Now, to explain why you shouldn’t run . . .”

  He flicks to the next slide, and it’s not a photograph, it’s a live surveillance take from a camera somewhere. I’m pretty sure it’s aboard this very ship. It’s Ramona, of course. She’s sprawling across a double bed in a stateroom, out cold. “Here’s Ms. Random. I figure you know by now that you don’t get to talk to her without my say-so. You need to know three things about her. Firstly, if I’ve got
you, I can make her do anything I want—and vice versa. You’ve figured that out? Excellent.”

  He pauses for a few seconds while I force myself to stop trying to break the arms of my chair. “There’s no need for that, Mr. Howard. No harm will come to either of you unless you force my hand. You’re here because I need her to do a little job for me, one relating to the recovery of the alien artifact—and I need her willing cooperation. So that’s item two out of the way. Item three, I gather you’ve met Mr. McMurray? Good. It might interest you to know that he’s a specialist in controlling entities like Ramona’s succubus, or Johanna’s necrophage. I could threaten to hurt you if she tries to resist, but I always find that positive incentivization works much better than the big stick on employees: so I’m going to offer her a deal. If you and Ms. Random cooperate fully, I’ll have Mr. McMurray see if he can permanently separate her from her little helper. As he was part of the team who invoked and bound it to her in the first place . . . well, what do you think she’ll say to that?”

  I pick up my water glass and drain it, hoping for something, anything, to occur to me that’ll show me a way out. Billington may not have tried to figure out my price, but I’m pretty sure he’s got Ramona’s. “What’s the job?”

  Billington prods at his fancy remote again and another screen comes to life: a view of a huge metal chamber, something like a factory floor—only the floor itself is covered in black water. A moment’s confusion, then it springs into focus for me. “Isn’t that the Glomar Explorer?”

  “It’s now the TLA Explorer, but yes, well spotted, Mr. Howard.”

  I focus on the pipe that pierces the heart of the pool of water. There’s something big and indistinct lurking just under the surface down there, impaled on the end of the drill string. “What’s that?”