The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

“Okay,” I say, and pause, staring at the weapon. “Are you sure that’s entirely safe?”

  He doesn’t smile: “Don’t push your luck.”

  I slowly move towards him and he steps back smartly into the corridor before gesturing me to walk ahead of him. He’s not alone, and his partner’s carrying a cut-down Steyr submachine gun with so many weird sensors bolted to the barrel that it looks like a portable spy satellite.

  “How much is he paying you?” I ask casually, as we reach a staircase leading back up to owner territory.

  Beret Number One grunts. “We got a really good benefits package.” Pause. “Better than the Marine Corps.”

  “And stock options,” adds the other joker. “Don’t forget the stock options. How many other dot-coms offer stock options for gun-toting minions?”

  “You can’t afford us,” his partner says casually. “Not after the IPO, anyway.”

  I can tell when they’re trying to fuck with my head; I shut up. At the top of the stairs I glance over my shoulder. “Door on the left,” says Beret Number One. “Go on, he won’t bite your head off.”

  “Unless you make him eat his hash browns cold,” adds Beret Number Two.

  I open the door. On the other side of it is a large, exquisitely paneled dining room. The table in the middle of the room is currently set for breakfast and I can smell frying bacon and eggs and toast and fresh coffee. My stomach tries to climb my throat and chow down on my sinuses: I am hungry. Which would be great except I’m simultaneously exposed to an appetite-suppressing sight: two stewards, the Billingtons, and their special breakfast guest, Ramona.

  “Ah, Mr. Howard. Would you care for a seat?” Ellis smiles broadly. Today he’s wearing one of those odd collarless Nehru suits that seem to be de rigueur for villains in bad techno-thrillers—but at least he hasn’t shaved his head and acquired a monocle or a dueling scar. Eileen Billington is a violent contrast in her cerise business suit with shoulder pads sized for an American football quarterback. She grimaces at me like I’m something her cat’s dragged in, then goes back to nibbling at her butter croissant as if she’s had her stomach stapled.

  I glance at Ramona as I step towards the table, and we make eye contact briefly. Someone’s raided her hotel room for her luggage—she’s swapped last night’s gown for casuals and a freshly scrubbed girl-next-door look. “Is that coffee?” I ask, nodding towards the pot.

  “Jamaican Blue Mountain.” Billington smiles thinly. “And yes, you may have some. I prefer not to conduct interviews while the subjects are comatose.”

  The steward pours me a cup of coffee as I sit down, and I try hard not to be obvious about how desperate I am for the stuff. (Another couple of hours without it and the merciless headache would be setting in, visited on me by my caffiend in retaliation for withdrawal of his drug.) As I take the first mouthful something brushes up against my ankle. I manage to control my knee-jerk reflex; it must be the cat, right?

  The coffee is as good as you’d expect from a billionaire’s buffet. “I needed that,” I admit. “But I’m still somewhat perplexed as to why you want me here at all.” (Although it beats the hell out of the alternatives, I don’t say.)

  “I’d have thought that was perfectly obvious.” Billington grins, with the boyish charm of a boardroom bandit whose charisma is his most potent weapon. “You’re here because you’re both young, intelligent, active professionals with good prospects. It’s so hard to get the help these days—” he nods at Eileen, who is sitting at the opposite end of the table, ignoring us by staring into inner space “—and I’ve found that interviewing candidates in person is a remarkably good way of avoiding subsequent disappointments. Human resources will only get you so far, after all.”

  I notice that Ramona is watching Eileen. “What’s up with her?” I ask.

  “Oh, her mind wanders.” Billington picks up his knife and fork and slices into a sausage. “Mostly all over her manufacturing sites; remote viewing is a marvelous management tool, don’t you think?” The sausage bleeds juice across his plate. I suddenly realize there are no hash browns or tomatoes or mushrooms or anything like that in front of him—it’s wall-to-wall dead animal flesh. “You should try it sometime.”

  Ramona looks me in the eye. “He told me what he wants me to do, Bob.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “What, ride the grab down to the abyssal plain . . . ?”

  “With you providing a running commentary,” Billington slides in unctuously. “After all, your current unfortunate state has certain transient advantages, does it not?” He smiles.

  “He also told me what he was offering.” She looks away, distraught. “I’m sorry, Bob. You were right.”

  “You—” I stop. ★★You’re going to trust him?★★ I ask via our private channel.

  ★★It’s not just the, the binding to my aspect,★★ she says, tongue-tied as she hunts for words. ★★If I do this for him, he makes McMurray set me free. What alternative do I have?★★

  Billington’s been watching us in silence for the past short while. Now he interrupts, in my direction: “If I may explain?” He nods at Ramona. “You have a simple choice. Cooperate, and I will have one of my associates perform the rite of disentanglement. You two will be free of each other forever if you so choose, and free of Ms. Random’s daemon. You’ll both live happily ever after, aside for a period of a few weeks during which you will be guests with limited freedom of movement, while I complete my current project. After it is finished, I can promise you there will be no reprisals from your employers. Nothing can possibly go wrong. You see, I don’t need to be nasty: it’s a win-win situation all round.”

  I lick my dry lips. “What if I don’t want to cooperate?” Billington shrugs. “Then you don’t run my errand, and I don’t pay you for it.” He spears a strip of bacon, saws it in half, and raises it to his teeth. “Business is business, Mr. Howard.”

  I flinch as if someone’s walked over my grave. He’s making me an offer I can’t refuse, disguising a threat of lethal violence as passive inaction. All he has to do to threaten us is let the nature of our entanglement take its course. I flash back to the yawning horror hiding behind Ramona’s soul, the dead weight of Marc’s body lying on top of her, suffocating and squeezing the breath from her body. Lock her up in her cabin for a few days and what will she eat? The thing inside her needs to feed. I have a sudden, disquieting vision: Ramona and myself, blurring at the edges, one confused mind in two bodies locked in separate cells, stalked by the dark side of our hybrid soul as the Other works itself up into an orgiastic fever that can only be satisfied by swallowing our minds—

  ★★I’m not giving up,★★ I tell her silently, then nod at Billington. “I get the picture. Business is business; I’ll cooperate.”

  “Excellent. Or jolly good, as I believe you English would say.” He smiles in evident delight as he spears the other half of the strip of bacon and dangles it at knee level. A white streak blurs out of the shadows under the table and snaps the bacon right off his fork.

  “Ah, Fluffy. There you are!” Billington reaches down and picks up the large, white cat, who turns his head and stares at me with sky-blue eyes that are disturbingly human. “I believe it’s about time you were introduced. Say hello to Mr. Howard, Fluffy.”

  Fluffy stares at me like I’m an oversized mouse, then hisses charmlessly.

  Billington grins at me from behind six kilos of annoyed cat. “Fluffy is what this is really about, Mr. Howard. I’m only doing this to keep him in kitty kibble, after all.”

  “Kitty kibble?” I shake my head. Fluffy is wearing a diamond collar that belongs in the Tower of London with a platoon of Beefeaters standing guard over it. “I for one welcome our new feline overlords.” I tip the cat an ironic nod.

  “I thought you could cover the cat-food bill out of the petty cash?” asks Ramona.

  “Fluffy has very expensive tastes.” Billington dotes on the wretched animal, which has calmed down slightly and is permitting him to scratch
it behind the ears.

  Eileen chooses this particularly surreal moment to quiver as if electrocuted; then she shakes her head, yawns, and looks about. “Have I missed anything?” she asks querulously.

  “Not a lot, dear.” Her husband regards her fondly. Breakfast with the Hitlers, I think, glancing between them. “Any news?”

  “Ach.” Eileen hunches like a vulture when she’s aware. “Everything is in order, the central business groups advance on all fronts, nothing to report today.” She glances at me sharply, then at Ramona. “I think we ought to continue this in the office, though. Flapping ears and all that.”

  Billington glances down at the table spread before him. I hastily refill my coffee cup before he looks up. “All right.” He nods, then stands up abruptly—still holding Fluffy—and nods at me, then at Ramona. “Feel free to finish up,” he says curtly. “Then you may return to your quarters. It won’t be long now.”

  He and Eileen stalk out of the dining room via a door at the back, leaving me alone with Ramona, the remains of breakfast, and the disturbing sense that I’ve somehow strayed onto loose gravel at the edge of a precipice, and it may be too late to turn back and reach safe ground.

  In the end, pragmatism wins: when you’re being held prisoner you never know where the next power breakfast is coming from, so I grab some slices of toast and a plateful of other munchies. Ramona sits hunched in her chair, looking out the porthole above the sideboard. Misery and depression is coming off her in black, stultifying waves.

  ★★We’ve not failed yet,★★ I tell her silently, my mouth full of hash browns. ★★As long as we can reestablish communications with Control we can get back on top of the situation. ★★

  ★★You think?★★ She holds out her coffee cup and the steward, who’s still waiting on us, fills it up. ★★What do you think they’ll do if we tell them what’s really going on? Give us time to get off the ship before they start shooting?★★

  She takes a mouthful of coffee and puts her cup down. I can feel it scalding her tongue, too hot to swallow: nevertheless, she gulps it down. I wince at the sudden paralyzing heartburn.

  ★★We’ll just have to stop him ourselves, then,★★ I say, trying to encourage her.

  ★★Whatever. It doesn’t work that way, Bob.★★

  ★★What doesn’t?★★

  ★★The geas.★★ She stands up then smiles at the steward. “If you don’t mind?” she says.

  The steward stands aside. There’s nobody human home behind his eyes; I sidle past him with my back to the wall. Ramona opens the side door beside the staircase. There’s a short passage with several doors opening off it. “I’ve got something to show you,” she tells me.

  Huh? Since when does Ramona have the run of Billington’s yacht? I follow her slowly, trying to worry out what’s going on.

  “In here.” She opens a door. “Don’t worry about the guards, they’re either down below or up on the superstructure—this is the owner’s accommodation area and they’re not needed as long as we stay in it. This is the grand lounge.”

  The lounge is surprisingly spacious. There are molded leather-topped benches all around the walls, and bookcases and glass cabinets. In the middle of the floor is something that might have been a pool table once, before a monomaniacal model maker repurposed it as his display cabinet.

  “What the hell is it?” I lean closer. On one side are two model ships, one being the Explorer, which I recognize from the huge drilling derrick; but the center of the table is occupied by a bizarre diorama: old dog-eared hardback novels and a worn-looking automatic pistol, piled on top of a reel of film and a map of the Caribbean. Something else: a set of fine wires tracing out—“Shit. That’s a Vulpis-Tesla array. And that box must be a—is that a Mod-60 Gravedust board it’s plugged into? Summoning up the spirits of the dead. What the hell?”

  There’s a GI Joe doll in evening dress, clutching a pistol. It’s wired up to the summoning grid by its plastic privates. On either side of it stand two Barbies in ball gowns, one black, one white. Behind them lurks another GI Joe, this time hacked so that he’s bald and bearded, in something that looks like Wehrmacht dress grays.

  All at once, I get the picture.

  “It’s the core of his coercion geas, isn’t it? It’s a destiny-entanglement conjuration, on a bigger scale. James Bond, channeling the ghost of Ian Fleming as scriptwriter . . . Jesus.” I glance across the table at Ramona. She looks flushed and apprehensive.

  “Yes, James—” She bites her lip. “Sorry, monkey-boy. It’s too strong in here, isn’t it?”

  I stare at her through narrowed eyes. Oh yes, I’m beginning to get it. I’m half-tempted to shoot the bint now, then stuff her through the porthole before the bad guys get their mileage out of her, but I need all the friends I can get right now, and until I’m sure she’s gone over to SPECTRE I can’t afford to—

  What. The. Fuck?

  I blink rapidly. “Is there somewhere we can go that’s not quite so . . . ?”

  “Yeah. Next door.”

  Next door is the library or smoking room or whatever the hell it’s called. My head stops swimming as soon as we get a wall between us and that diorama from Hell. “That was bad. What’s the big idea? Why does Billington want to turn me into James Bond?”

  Ramona slumps into an overstuffed chair. “It’s not about you, Bob. It’s all about plot. The way the geas works, he’s set himself up as the evil villain in this humongous destiny-entanglement spell targeted against every intelligence agency and government on the planet. The end state for this conjuration is that the hero—which means whoever’s being ridden by the Bond archetype—comes and kills the villain, destroys his secret floating headquarters, stymies his scheme, and gets the girl. But Billington’s not stupid. He may be riding the Villain archetype but he’s in control of the geas and he’s got a good sense of timing. Before the Hero archetype gets to resolve the terminal crisis, he ends up in the villain’s grasp under circumstances such that nobody else is positioned to deal with the villain’s plan. Ellis figures that he can short the geas out before it goes terminal and makes the Bond figure kill him. At which point Billington will be left sitting in an unassailable position since the only agent on the planet who’s able to stop him wakes up and suddenly remembers that he’s not James Bond.”

  I consider this for a full minute. “Whoops.”

  “That’s how we screwed up,” she says bleakly. “Billington had a handle on me all along. I’m his handle on you, and you’re his handle on Angleton. He’s stacked us up like a row of dominos.”

  I take a deep breath. “What happens if I go next door and smash the diorama?”

  “The signal strength—” She shakes her head. “You noticed how fast it drops off? If you’re close enough to smash it the backwash will kill you, but it’ll probably leave Billington alive. If we could get word out about what’s going on it might be worth trying, but nobody’s close enough to do anything right now—so we’re back to square one. It really has to be shut down in good order, the same way it was set up, and I’d guess that’s why Billington’s brought that fucker Pat aboard.”

  “Hang on,” I say slowly. “Griffin was sure there was a shit-hot Black Chamber assassin in town this week. Some guy code named Charlie Victor. Could he do anything about Billington if we cleared a path?”

  “Bob, Bob. I’m Charlie Victor.” She looks at me with the sort of sympathetic expression usually reserved for terminal cases.

  I consider this for a moment. Then an atavistic reflex kicks in and I snap my fingers. “Then you must be, um . . . you’re the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, right? Like Major Amasova in the film version of The Spy Who Loved Me, or Jinx in Die Another Day. Does that mean you’re the Good Bond Babe archetype or the Bad Bond Babe?”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m bad—” She’s looking at me oddly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “There are usually two Babes in every Bond movie,”
I say slowly. Shit, she isn’t British, is she? I keep forgetting. She hasn’t suffered through the ritual Bond movie every Christmas afternoon on ITV since the age of two. I’d probably seen them all by the time I was fifteen, and read some of the books, but I’ve never had to use the knowledge before now . . .

  “Look, Bond almost always has two Babes. Sometimes it’s three, and in a few of the later movies they experimented with one, but it’s almost always two. The first to show up is the Bad Bond Babe, who usually works for the villain and who sleeps with Bond before coming to a nasty end. The second, the Good Bond Babe, helps him resolve the plot and doesn’t shag him until just before the closing credits. You haven’t slept with me so far, which probably means you’re safe—at least, you’re not the Bad Bond Babe. But you might be the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, who’s sort of a revisionist merge between the Bad Bond Babe and the Good Bond Babe, who turns up later, gets Bond out of a load of grief, tries to kill him, and eventually sleeps with him—”

  “—I hope this isn’t a come-on, monkey-boy, because if it is—”

  “The setup’s skewed. And I reckon we’re going to have company soon.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “There are never two girls in the movies that feature the glamorous rival assassin,” I say, trying to get my head around what this signifies. “And this plot doesn’t fit that mold. Not with Mo on her way out here.”

  “Mo? Your girlfriend?” Ramona gives me a hard-edged stare.

  I look around. The shelves are covered in business administration titles with an admixture of first editions of Ian Fleming novels—boosters for the geas, at a guess—and the portholes show me a view of a dark blue sea beneath a turquoise sky.

  “She said she was coming out here right after she finished reaming Angleton,” I add, and wait for the double take.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Ramona says primly. “I’ve read her dossier. She’s just an academic who stumbled into some classified topics!”

  “Yes, but I’ll bet that dossier doesn’t have much on her after your organization gave her permission to leave, does it? That was three years ago. Did you know she works for the Laundry these days? And have you heard her violin? She plays music to die for . . .”