Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  • • •

  I MANAGE TO GET A VERY UNSOUND EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP, punctuated by various anxiety dreams. You want anxiety dreams? I’ve got them all: if I could bottle ’em and sell ’em I could out-gross George Romero. There’s the regular strain—at the office with no clothes, having to get home across rush-hour London in the buff—and the more recondite variety where I’m being stalked by zombie clowns because I misfiled an expense report. And then there’s the extra special sauce variety.

  In this recurring dream it’s night, I’m at home in my own bedroom (yes, I’m in bed, dreaming I’m in bed, dreaming . . .) and Mo’s awake next to me. And there’s a crib. No, we don’t have kids: given what’s going to happen as the stars come into their unfortunately-too-damned-accurately-foretold alignment, it just seemed like a really bad idea. But in this dream, there’s a bone-white cot in our bedroom, with bars around it and some kind of net curtain arrangement dangling around it. Talk about symbolism, right?

  There’s no baby in the nonexistent crib, but if there was it would be crying. And because the not-a-baby in the not-a-cot isn’t crying, Mo is playing it a lullaby on her bone-white fiddle. All this is terribly wrong. At least I can’t hear the music, which is a minor mercy. Probably my unconscious imagination doesn’t have the cognitive horsepower to generate such a horror. Because Mo doesn’t own her violin; she holds it in trust for the organization, and practices with it, and then operates it. It’s bone-white because it’s made from polished bones—human bones extracted from more than a dozen living donors without anesthesia in the predecessors of the medical laboratories at Birkenau and Belsen. It’s an Erich Zahn original, with Hilbert-space pickups, and it plays the music of the hyperspheres until the audience bleed from ears, and eyes, and other orifices. I’ve seen it steal souls and lay the walking dead to rest. I’ve seen it whip up a storm and blast lightning across the floor of a megalomaniac’s floating fortress. It is not a suitable instrument for lullabies and nursery rhymes and so it is a very good thing that we didn’t have a child and the crib is empty . . .

  Isn’t it?

  The point where I usually slam into shuddering wakefulness with my pulse hammering and the sheet clinging to the small of my back is the bit where I dream that I sit up and look towards the crib, with a choking sense of dread at what I’m going to see when I look through the hanging veil that shrouds the bars. But this time the dream is a doozie: it lets me sit up and look and yes, there in the crib is a baby, and look at its little metatarsals and vertebrae and the jawbone gaping in an eternal silent howl. And then I get to look round and see Mo playing the violin, but her face is skeletonized, eye sockets empty and glowing faintly in the light cast by the slowly turning wormlike feeders that possess her, and the violin—

  I actually get to see the violin this time, in this particular dream. And that’s when I wake up screaming to find that it’s five in the morning and Mo is still away on whatever job they’ve sent her on this time, so I don’t even have a shoulder to cling to. Bad dream: brrr! You want to know how bad it is? It’s exactly bad enough that rather than trying to go back to sleep, I go downstairs to make coffee and try to work out what the hell I’m going to tell the committee in a few hours’ time.

  • • •

  I GO INTO THE OFFICE AND HEAD FOR THE BRIEFING ROOM AT 9 a.m., clutching a mug of coffee as if it’s the handle of an umbrella that can protect me from the incoming storm-front of blame. If you start out by expecting them to fire you, or at least ream you out for someone else’s fuck-up, it’s hard to see how the day can get any worse. Isn’t it?

  Bad mistake, Bob.

  The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up. And we are now entering stage three.

  The first meeting actually goes a lot better than I have any right to expect. First I give my version of events, while Jez scrawls it on the board at the front of the room, compiling a timeline. Lockhart is chairing. “You can sit down now, Bob,” he says. Then he looks at Andy. “You got the file I asked for?”

  “Yes, of course.” Andy appears to have had no more sleep than me. He hauls up an ancient leather attaché file with a padlock and the EIIR crest branded into it: one of the secure wallets we use for shuffling paper files back and forth from the stacks. (The padlock is the least of the security measures attached to it: open it without permission—or try remote viewing the contents—and you’ll be lucky if you don’t spend the rest of your days drooling in a wheelchair.) “I see the privacy light is lit?”

  “Witnessed,” Jez echoes.

  “Okay, by the authority vested in me I hereby declare this to be the designated committee with need-to-know clearance for BLUE DANDELION forty-six slash alpha, Bob’s most recent Code Blue. And everyone here by definition has confidential keyword OPERA CAPE, which covers the nature of the, um, people Bob discovered. Everyone agree?”

  Lockhart gives his assent, then sends me a quelling look. “Mr. Howard, if you’d be so good as to wait in the quiet corner?” he asks. It’s an order disguised as a request. I stand up and shuffle over to the corner and stand facing the wall. All the sounds from behind me are abruptly muffled, as if a great distance away. Most of our meeting rooms are fitted with these cones of silence, for just this sort of situation: I may be part of this committee but I’m not, apparently, trusted to see the contents of Mhari’s HR transcript. Which just goes to show that not everyone here is irredeemably stupid (or, alternatively, willing to let me compromise myself).

  Standing in the corner like a naughty toddler gets old fast, but just as I’m contemplating tapping my toes and whistling something annoying to speed things along I faintly hear Lockhart call out: “Mr. Howard! You can come out now!”

  I turn round and approach the table. The attaché case is zipped up and padlocked again, bulging like a snake that has just swallowed a rabbit. “What am I allowed to know?” I ask.

  Jez gives Andy a significant look, then turns to face me. She’s standing by the board again. “You’re off the hook, Bob. Ms. Murphy was still on the permanent-inactive list for an hour after you called Code Blue. She didn’t call in and ask to be reactivated until lunchtime yesterday. Off the record, I gather she might have tried to talk an old friend into backdating her activation a month or so—but HR aren’t idiots. You very nearly caught her out.”

  “Whoa.” I slump into my chair. “So you’re saying whatever she was doing with that team of quants was not a deniable operation? She was actively up to something on the outside, and got a chill and decided to cover her ass at the last moment? That it’s just pure bloody coincidence that I didn’t catch her red-handed?”

  Jez nods, very seriously. “It looks like they were waiting for you—or someone. We’re going to find it hard to prove and harder to pin any culpability on her in view of her bringing it home before you caught up with them, but at the least it’s going to go down as a big fat question mark on her record. The initial analysis suggests that whatever they stumbled on happened more than four weeks ago, and she should have reported it right away if she wanted to keep her nose clean.”

  Lockhart looks as if he’s swallowed the proverbial early-morning frog; Andy isn’t much happier either. As for me, I might be off the hook but I’m not doing the happy dance. Mhari has somehow reactivated herself and is fully aware that I’m on her case, which means she’s either going to try and stab me or fuck me: possibly both, in no particular order. (And yes, the ambiguous use of the verb “to fuck” in the preceding sentence is intentional.)

  “Maybe she fell into something and was too busy swimming to think about the big picture?” Andy proposes charitably. Uncharitably, I decide that this is Andy’s week for being charitable to fuck-ups (but I keep this opinion to myself).

  It’s a suggestion that has some merit, but Jez is shaking her head. “No, you saw the file. She’s got form for contingency exercises. Even if her schem
es didn’t often pan out, she was capable of forward planning. I know Gilbert, and he wouldn’t have written what he did on her annual review in ’02 if she was just another mendacious bubblehead. Unstable and destructive, but also fast-thinking and potentially a high-flyer.” (Lockhart rolls an eye at me: What’s that supposed to mean?) “I think she worked out what she’d fallen into right at the outset. And she moved her plans forward just as we sent someone to round her up? That’s not a coincidence. I think we were deliberately spoofed.”

  I’m shaking my head. “She’s not smart enough to plan something like that,” I explain. “I mean, she was mercurial and able to go from kiss to kill in about five seconds flat, but long-term planning wasn’t her strong point.”

  However, Lockhart and Jez and Andy are nodding their heads at me like a row of bobbleheads, and I get an inkling that maybe I’m not privy to something.

  “Bob, Bob.” It’s Andy. “You were close to her for a while, but you only had one angle on her. We’ve got full access to her file and she’s more complex than that. Her private life and her actual work performance—at least, as of a decade ago—look like they belong to two different people. She’s very good at performative compartmentalization. It’s a major asset in an officer and she should have gone far within the organization, but, well. We—and by we, I mean we, the Laundry—clearly failed to get the best out of her, and in the end, she fired us. Gave us no sensible options other than to let her leave on more or less her own terms. And now she’s reactivated herself—again, on her own terms. Do you really think she’d have ended up as a project manager in an elite rocket science team inside one of our biggest investment banks if she was an attention-deficit basket case?”

  “But I—” I flap my jaw helplessly. “You’re saying that as her boyfriend I only got to see the poor impulse control stuff she kept out of her work life?” I ask. Andy nods encouragingly. “And that she was venting at me because it provided an outlet for stuff she was keeping a lid on in the office?” This time it’s Jez who nods. I can’t tell whether her expression is sympathetic or patronizing. Nerd with social deficit disorder: give him time to work it out for himself, or some such. “She was just using me as a scratching post and chew-toy? Well, shit!”

  “It’s quite common,” Lockhart says, his expression uncharacteristically distant and thoughtful. “It’s why going native or falling in love with a source is such a big no-no on a HUMINT op. It blinds you to other aspects of their personality. You don’t get to see their feet of clay when your head’s in the clouds.” I blink and do a double take: he sounds as if he’s speaking from experience.

  “Well, I’ll grant you I had an unusual perspective on her. But what are we going to do now?” I ask.

  Jez turns back to the whiteboard and sketches something that, after a moment, I recognize as a box. Then she writes a name on it: MHARI. “We put her in a box,” she explains. An arrow points at the box: INPUTS. Another arrow leads out of the box: OUTPUTS. “Assuming she’s trying to run something on us, we feed her a barium meal and see what leaks, yes? And for now we let her think her insertion phase succeeded.”

  “Hey, wait a—” I’m ahead of her, but only just.

  “Bob, you’re the sacrificial goat. We know she’s got a low opinion of you, and has very little idea of what you’re capable of. So we’re going to work to reinforce that. The official minutes of this meeting will not record us discussing Mhari’s timing. Nor will they mention your epidemiological research, the reason for the Code Blue, or your preparations. Instead they’ll focus on us dumping on you for calling in a spurious Code Blue and wasting resources—” She stops and looks at Lockhart. “Yes?”

  Lockhart shakes his head. “Nothing relevant. Forget I was here. Redact my name from the minutes.”

  We all turn to stare at him. “The Senior Auditor will sign off on everything if I advise him to,” he says, and the temperature in the briefing room drops five degrees.

  “Are you sure?” Jez asks tentatively. (Mentioning our overseers is about as welcome as mentioning Old Nick at a funeral.)

  “Let’s just say that I believe it would be unwise to attach my name to a document that Ms. Murphy might subsequently stumble across if she goes looking for it. She does not need to be aware that External Assets has an interest in this situation.” He glowers at me. “She does not need to be aware that Bob is involved in External Assets, either.”

  “Well gee, thanks for the vote of confidence!”

  “See me later, Bob,” he grunts, then turns back to look at Jez. I notice that Andy is watching our exchange with the still, silent fascination of a fly on the wall that is canny enough to be aware of the existence of swatters.

  “If you don’t mind.” There’s a waspish edge to Jez’s voice as she picks up her train of thought again: “Bob, we’re going to whitewash this meeting’s minutes, and unjustifiably blacken your name until such time as we have established exactly what Ms. Murphy and her worryingly powered-up quants are up to. At which time this committee will reconvene and correct the record. Meanwhile, we’re going to conduct ourselves as if we have swallowed her bait. And then we’re going to engineer a situation where she can’t avoid interacting with you. Are you clear on why we’re doing this? Can you cope?”

  “What are you asking? Can I keep my lid on when dealing with my psycho ex from hell?”

  “Essentially, yes.” This from Andy, who has the decency to look slightly embarrassed in his characteristic hangdog way.

  I shrug. “I’ve been married to someone else for years. I’m a grown-up: I can cope.”

  “Good.” Jez glances at Andy, then back to me. “Then the rest is up to you.”

  • • •

  IT’S EASIER TO TAKE TIME OFF IN LIEU THAN TO FILL OUT THE overtime claim for a failed Code Blue. I go home early that afternoon, to lick my wounds and catch up on some non-classified reading. I’m expecting to spend another quiet night in with the computer, playing a cheesy MMO based in a Planescape spin-off, with maybe half a bottle of wine and a takeaway pizza for company. But at about six o’clock, just after dark, I hear the front door opening.

  I’m not one to worry—our front door was reinforced a couple of years ago after I was doorstepped by a zombie from the KGB’s occult successor organization, although it’s sometimes amusing to let the Jehovah’s Witlesses get far enough inside to see the security grid embedded in the porch floor—but I heave myself out of the buttock-eating living room sofa to go and check who’s there, just in case. I needn’t have bothered.

  “Mo?” I ask, as she lets the door swing closed. She’s wearing a long black dress and jacket with some kind of shawl over her shoulders, suitcase on the floor behind her and violin case in hand. She looks like she’s been somewhere in the Middle East, and she’s clearly exhausted.

  “Bob, be a love and put the kettle on? Been a long day.”

  “Okay.” I pad into the kitchen—I’m wearing bedroom slippers—and fill up the kettle again. She’ll be wanting tea, at a guess. “Where’ve you been? Can you talk?”

  “I—yes, I can talk.” She doesn’t sound happy, though. “Later. Some other time. For now I just need tea, then a shower and change and some company to keep me awake until bedtime. It’s been a very long day.”

  “How long?” I ask, trying to keep her going.

  “I was on a flight from Tehran to Istanbul at, let’s see, five o’clock this morning? Which would be one-thirty over here. I’ve been up since before midnight, in other words.” She comes in, pulls out a chair from the kitchen table, and drops into it like a sack of spuds. Her cheeks are jowly and loose with fatigue, her eyelids bruised by dehydration. “I hate this job.”

  I’m still processing. “You were in Tehran?” Adding a hearty what the fuck? is unnecessary: that’s a bit far out of our usual stomping grounds to say the least.

  She nods, begins to droop, then raises the violin case and
plants it on the kitchen table right between the bowl with the browning fair trade bananas and the heatproof mat I was going to put the teapot on. “Usual guarantees apply.”

  Despite all the shouting about nuclear reprocessing, and the saber-rattling about aircraft carriers and the Strait of Hormuz, it turns out that almost everyone is on the same side with respect to the Axis of Ancient, Undying, and Truly Inhuman Evil. So from time to time the Laundry gets strangely phrased requests for assistance from a rather obscure corner of VEVAK, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. (They almost always ask too late, especially in view of the number of permits and authorizations required before we can agree to send someone, because they seem to think we’re fiendish hyper-competent Svengalis of the Supernatural. They have always had an unrealistically high opinion of the British secret intelligence services. It’s nice to be wanted, even if they’d die of shame rather than admit it in public.)

  “So the thing on Monday, that was Iran?”

  “Yes.” She nods. The kettle comes to a rolling boil and switches itself off; I busy myself filling a pot with loose-leaf Darjeeling. “I need tea. And a bath. Then dinner. Then someone to keep me from falling asleep.”

  “Is the jet lag particularly bad?”

  “No, but I’m going to have bad dreams.” She shudders slightly and pulls her shawl tight around her shoulders. It’s silk, and looks as if it’s probably very fashionable, not to say expensive. She notices my gaze. “Isn’t it nice? I bought it at the airport duty-free, on the way out. The VEVAK people I was working with kept trying to impress me with how Anglophile and welcoming they were, but going without a head covering there is like wandering around London topless, so I thought I should buy something I can use as a scarf when winter starts to bite.” She lets it fall from her shoulders and shakes it out, then begins to carefully fold it. Her hands are shaking slightly, and I can see the veins and tendons through the pale, almost translucent skin behind her knuckles. They’re more visible than when we first met: a side effect of growing older together.