The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  I’m still feeling burned by the whole affair. Bruised and used about sums it up; and I’m not ready to face Mo yet, so I had to find somewhere to hole up and lick my wounds. The Village isn’t a resort, but there’s a three-story modern building called the Monkfish Motel that’s not entirely unlike a bad ’60s Moat House—I think it was originally built as MOD married quarters—and there’s the Dog and Whistle to drink in, and if I get drunk and start babbling about beautiful man-eating mermaids and sunken undersea horrors, nobody’s going to bat an eyelid.

  It’s late afternoon and I’m on my second pint, slumped in the grasp of the sofa in the east corner of the lounge bar. I’m the only customer at this time of day—most everyone else is off attending training courses or working—but the bar stays open all the same.

  The door opens. I’m busy failing to reread a dog-eared paperback biography, my mind skittering off the words as if they’re polished ice cubes that melt and slide away whenever I warm them with my glance. Right now it’s gathering moss on the coffee table in front of me as I idly flip the antique Zippo lighter that’s the one part of my disguise kit I ended up bringing home. Footsteps slowly approach, clattering on the bare floor. I sit there in the corner, and I wonder tiredly if I ought to run away. And then it’s too late.

  “He told me I’d find you here,” she says.

  “Really?” I put the Zippo down and look up at her.

  THE PRELUDE TO THIS LITTLE DRAMA TOOK PLACE the day before yesterday in Angleton’s office. I was sitting in the cheap plastic visitor’s seat he keeps on the other side of his desk, my line of sight partially blocked by the bulky green-enameled flank of his Memex, trying to hold my shit together. Up until this point I’d been doing a reasonable job, aided by Angleton going out of his way to explain how we were going to clear my entirely unreasonable expense claims with the Auditors: but then he decided to try and get all human on my ass.

  “You’ll be able to see her whenever you want,” he said, right out of the blue, without any warning.

  “Fuck it! What makes you think—”

  “Look at me, boy.” There’s a tone of voice he uses that reaches into the back of your head and pulls the control wires, grating and harsh and impossible to ignore: it got my attention.

  I looked directly at him. “I am sick and tired of everyone tiptoeing around me as if I’m going to explode,” I heard myself say. “Apologizing won’t help: what’s done is done, there’s no going back on it. It was a successful mission and the ends, at least in this case, justify the means. However underhanded they were.”

  “If you believe that, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.” Angleton closed the cover of the accounts folder and put his pen down. Then he caught my gaze. “Don’t be a fool, son.”

  Angleton’s not his real name—real names confer power, which is why we always, all of us, use pseudonyms—nor is it the only thing about him that doesn’t ring true: I saw the photographs in his dream-briefing, and if he was that old when he was along for the ride on Operation JENNIFER, he can’t be a day under seventy today. (I’ve also seen an eerily similar face in the background of certain archival photographs dating from the 1940s, but let’s not go there.) “Is this where you give me the benefit of your copious decades of experience? Stiff upper lip, the game’s the thing, they also serve who whatever-the-hell-the-saying goes?”

  “Yes.” His cheek twitched. “But you’re missing something.”

  “Huh. And what’s that?” I hunker down in my chair, resigned to having to sit through a sanctimonious lecture about wounded pride or something.

  “We fucked with your head, boy. And you’re right, it is just another successful operation, but that doesn’t mean we don’t owe you an apology and an explanation.”

  “Great.” I crossed my arms defensively.

  He picked up his pen again, scratching notes on his desk pad. “Two weeks’ compassionate leave. I can stretch it to a month if you need it, but beyond that, we’ll need a medical evaluation.” Scribble, scribble. “That goes for both of you. Counseling, too.”

  “What about Ramona?” The words hung in the air like lead balloons.

  “Separate arrangements apply.” He glanced up again, fixing me with a wintry blue stare. “I’m also recommending that you spend the next week at the Village.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Because that’s where Predictive Branch says you need to go, boy. Did you want fries with that?”

  “Fucking hell. What do they have to do with things?”

  “If you’d ever studied knife fighting, one of the things your instructors would have drilled into you is that you always clean your blade after using it, and if possible sharpen and lubricate it, before you put it away. Because if you want to use it again sometime, you don’t want to find it stuck to the scabbard, or blunt, or rusted. When you use a tool, you take care to maintain it, boy, that’s common sense. From the organization’s point of view . . . well, you’re not just an interchangeable part, a human resource: we can’t go to the nearest employment center and hire a replacement for you just like that. You’ve got a unique skill mix that would be very difficult to locate—but don’t let it go to your head just yet—which is why we’re willing to take some pains to help you get over it. We used you, it’s true. And we used Dr. O’Brien, and you’re both going to have to get used to it, and what’s more important to you right now—because you expect to be used for certain types of jobs now and again—is that we didn’t use you the way you expected to be used. Am I right?”

  I spluttered for a moment. “Oh, sure, that’s everything! In a nutshell! I see the light now, it’s just in my nature to be all offended about having my masculinity impugned by being cast in the role of the Good Bond Babe, hero-attractor and love interest for Mo in her capacity as the big-swinging-dick secret agent man with the gun, I mean, violin, and the license to kill. Right? It’s just vanity. So I guess I’d better go powder my nose and dry my tears so I can look glamorous and loving for the closing romantic-interest scene, huh?”

  “Pretty much.” Angleton nodded. His lip quirked oddly. A suppressed smile?

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Angleton, that’s leaving just a little bit out. Not to mention Ramona. If you think you could tie our brains together like the Kilkenny cats, then just cut us loose—it doesn’t work that way, you know?”

  “Yes.” He nodded again. “And that’s why you need to go to the Village,” he said briskly. “Talk to her. Settle where you both stand, in your own mind.” He picked up his papers and looked away, an implicit dismissal. I rose to my feet.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” he added.

  “What?”

  “While you’re about it, remember to talk to Dr. O’Brien as well. You both need to sort things out—and sooner, rather than later.”

  “HE MADE IT AN ORDER.” SHE SHRUGS. “SO HERE I am.” Looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else on the planet.

  “Enjoying yourself?” I ask. It’s the sort of stilted, stupid question you ask when you’re trying to make small talk but walking on eggshells in case the other person explodes at you. Which is what I’m half-expecting—this situation is a minefield.

  “No,” she says with forced levity. “The weather sucks, the beer’s warm, the sea’s too cold for swimming, and every time I look at it . . .” She stalls, the thin glaze of collected-ness cracking. “Can I sit down?”

  I pat the sofa beside me. “Be my guest.”

  She sits down in the opposite corner, an arm’s length away. “You’re acting like you’re mad at me.”

  I glance at the book on the table. “I’m not mad at you.” I try to figure out what to say next: “I’m mad at the way the circumstances made things turn out. Are you still mad at her?”

  “At her?” She chuckles, startled. “I don’t think she had any more choice in it than you did. Why should I be mad at her?”

  I pick up my glass and take a long mouthful of beer. “Because we slept together?”


  “Because you—what?” A waspish tone creeps into her voice: “But I thought you said you hadn’t!”

  I put my glass down. “We didn’t.” I meet her eye. “In the Bill Clinton sense of things, I can honestly say I have not had sexual intercourse with that woman. You know what the Black Chamber did to her? If I had slept with her I’d be dead.”

  “But how can you—” Mo is confused.

  “Her monster had to feed. Before you came and unbound it, it had to feed. She had to feed it, or it would have eaten her. I was along for the ride.”

  Enlightenment dawns. “But now she’s there—” a wave in the vague direction of the drowned village of Dunwich, a mile out to sea, where the Laundry maintains its outpost “—and you’re here. And you’re both safe.”

  Acid indigestion. “Safe from what?” I ask, watching her sidelong.

  “Safe from—” She stops. “Why are you looking at me?”

  “She’s undergoing the change, you know that? They can usually hold it off, but in her case it’s looking irreversible.”

  Mo nods, reluctantly.

  “Probably it was triggered by the deep-diving excursion,” I add. “Although proximity to certain thaumic resonances can bring it on prematurely.” Which you would be in a position to know all about, I don’t say. It’s a horrible thing to suspect of anyone, especially your partner who you’ve been sharing a house with for enough years that it’s getting to be a habit. “I gather they expect her to make it, with her mind intact.”

  “That’s good,” Mo says automatically. A double take: “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Is it a good thing?” I ask.

  “That’s not a question I’d have expected you to ask.”

  I sigh. None of this is straightforward. “Mo, you could have warned me they were training you in deep-cover insertion and extraction operations! Jesus, I thought I was the one on the sharp end!”

  “And you were!” she snaps at me suddenly. “Did you wonder how I felt about it, every time you disappeared on a black bag job? Did you ask if maybe I was worried sick that you were never coming back? You know what I know, how helpless do you think that left me feeling?”

  “Whoa! I didn’t want you to worry—”

  “You didn’t want! Jesus, Bob, what does it take to get through to you? You can’t stop other people worrying just by not wanting them to. It’s not about you, dim-bulb, it’s about me. At least, this time it was. Or do you think I turned up there on your ass by accident?”

  I stare at her, at a loss for words.

  “Let me lay it out for you, Bob. The whole solitary reason Angleton assigned you to that stupid fucking arrangement with Ramona was precisely because you didn’t know what was going on. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t leak to Ramona.”

  “I got that much, but why—”

  “Billington was enslaved by JENNIFER MORGUE Two sometime in the ’70s, after the abortive attempt to raise the K-129. He tried to contact the chthonian using the Gravedust rig—a little private free enterprise, if you like. JENNIFER MORGUE Two wanted out, and wanted out bad, but it needed someone to come and repair it. Billington provided it with a temporary host body, kitty kibble, and he had the resources to buy the Explorer—once the US Navy decommissioned it—and kit it out for a retrieval run. And we knew all this, on deep background, three years ago.”

  I blink. “Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?”

  “Me.” She looks impatient. “And Angleton. And everybody else with BLUE HADES clearance who’s been working on the project. Except for you, and a couple of others, who’ve been kept in a mushroom box against the day.”

  “Damn.” I pick up my glass and drain what’s left of the beer. “I need another drink.” Pause. “You too?”

  “Make mine a double vodka martini on ice.” She pulls a face. “I can’t seem to kick the habit.”

  I stand up and walk inside to the bar, where the middle-aged barwoman is sitting on a stool poring over the Sudoku in the back of the Express. “Two double vodka martinis on ice.” I say diffidently.

  The woman puts her magazine down. She stares at me like I crawled out from under a rock. “You’re going to say shaken, not stirred, ain’t cha?” She’s got a Midwestern accent: probably another defector, I guess. “You know how bad that tastes?”

  “Make it one shaken, one stirred, then. Off the ice. And easy on the vermouth.” I wink.

  I go back towards the corner I’d claimed, then pause in the archway. Mo’s leaning back in the sofa, infinitely familiar. For a moment my breath catches in my throat and I have to stop and try to commit the picture to memory in case it turns out to be one of the last good times. Then I force myself to get my legs moving again.

  “They’ll be over in a minute,” I say, dropping onto the sofa beside her.

  “Good.” She stares at the windows overlooking the beach. “You know the Black Chamber wanted to get their hands on JENNIFER MORGUE. That’s what McMurray was doing there.”

  “Yes.” So she thinks I want to talk about business?

  “We couldn’t let them do that. But luckily for us, Billington . . . well, he wasn’t entirely sane to begin with, and when he came up with the idea of implementing a Hero trap, that made things a lot easier.”

  “Easier?” It’s a good thing I don’t have a drink in my hand.

  “Absolutely.” She nods. “Imagine if Billington had simply gone to the Black Chamber and said, ‘Ten billion and it’s yours,’ keeping his fix-it plan to himself. But instead, he gets this idea that he’s got to act in solitary as the prime mover in the scheme, and of course he’s the archetype of the billionaire megalomaniac, so he does the obvious thing: leverages his assets. The Hero trap—the geas he built around that yacht—required a hero to trigger it. He figured the plot structure is deterministic: the hero falls into the bad guy’s hands, the bad guy monologues—and at that point, he was going to destroy the trap, neuter the hero, who is just another civil servant at this point, stripped of the resonances of the Bond invocation—and allow his plan to proceed to completion.”

  “Except . . .”

  “You know the alternative plot?” She glances at the book I’ve been reading: a biography of a playboy turned naval intelligence officer, news agency manager, and finally spy novelist.

  “What?” I shake my head. “I thought it was—”

  “Yes, it’s so neat you can draw a flow chart. But it’s nondeterministic, Bob: the Bond plot structure has a number of forks in it before it converges on the ending, with Mr. Secret Agent Man and his love interest getting it on in a lifeboat or the honeymoon suite of the QE2 or something. Including the approach to the villain. Billington didn’t look into it deeply enough; he assumed that the Hero archetype would come looking for him and fall into his clutches directly.”

  “But.” I snap my fingers, trying to collect my scattered thoughts. “You. Me. He got me, but I wasn’t the real Bond-figure, right? I was a decoy.”

  She nods. “It happens. If the love interest ends up on the villain’s yacht, being held prisoner, then the hero has to go after her. Or him. The real trick was the idea—I think it was Angleton’s—of using the Good Bond Girl as a decoy by dressing her up in a tux and a shoulder holster. And then to figure out how to use this to get the Black Chamber to put one over on Billington.”

  “Ramona. She knew that I thought I was the agent in place, so she naturally assumed I really was the agent.”

  “Right. And this also let us identify a leak in our own organization, because how else did Billington make you so rapidly? Which turns out to have been Jack. Last of the public school assholes, hung out to dry out where he couldn’t do any damage—so he develops a sideline in selling intel to what he thinks is another disgruntled outsider.”

  “Urk.” I suddenly remember the electrodynamic rig Griffin had stuck in his safe house and briefly wonder just what the hell else he might have been picking up on it, sitting pretty in the middle of the Caribbean with no sup
ervision.

  Mo falls silent. I realize she’s waiting for something. My tongue’s frozen: there are questions I want to ask, but it’s a bad idea to ask something when you’re not sure you want to hear the answer. “Did you enjoy being . . . Bond?” I finally manage.

  “Did I?” She raises an eyebrow. “Hell.” She frowns. “Did you?” she demands.

  “But I wasn’t—”

  “But you thought you were.”

  “No!” The very question is freighted with significance I don’t want to explore. “I don’t do high society, I don’t smoke, I don’t like being beaten up, being taken prisoner, being tortured, or fighting people, and I’m no good at the womanizing bit.” I dry-swallow. “How about you?”

  “Well,” she pauses to consider, “I’m no good at womanizing either.” Her cheek twitches. “Is that what this is about, Bob? Did you figure I was cheating on you?”

  “I was—” I clear my throat “—unsure where I stood.”

  “We need to talk about this. Get it out in the open sometime. Don’t we?”

  I nod. It’s about all I can do.

  “I didn’t jump into bed with anybody else,” she says briskly. “Does that make you feel better?”

  No, it doesn’t. Now I feel like a shit for having asked in the first place. I make myself nod.

  “Well, great.” She crosses her arms, then taps her fingers on her upper arm: “Where have our drinks gotten to?”

  “I ordered the martinis. I guess she’s taking her time.” Quick, change the subject. I really don’t want us to fall down one of those embarrassing conversational potholes where the silence stretches out into an eloquent statement of mutual miscommunication: “So, how did you manage to disguise yourself as Eileen? You really had me convinced at first.”