I pivot silently from teapot to drinks cupboard, wherein I locate the remains of the bottle of Glenmorangie from the other night. There are still a couple of fingers left in it so I pour them all into a tumbler and shove it in front of her. “Sun’s over the yardarm. Drink.”
“If I must.” She looks morose. I turn back to the pot, add loose-leaf tea and hot water, and set it aside to brew. “There is a distinct lack of contact with the hard edges of reality in some parts of the organization these days.”
“Alternatively, you spend too much time poking around corners of the envelope that sensible people stay away from,” I propose.
“Somebody’s got to do it.” She stares at me.
“I had an interesting interview with Angleton today,” I say, “between meetings. Well, after one meeting. Then I sort of called another.” I look guilty. “I created a new committee.”
“Oh. Really?”
“I think someone inside the organization is trying to gaslight us.”
“Well, that’d be a first.” She knocks back a startlingly large gulp of water-of-life then puts the tumbler down and fans herself. “Nobody, in the history of the Laundry, has ever tried to pull the wool over anyone else’s eyes—”
“Planet Earth calling?”
“Yes?” She pays attention but she looks worried. My heart goes out to her but I’m not sure how to break through the icy sheen of cynicism she’s wrapping around herself.
“‘There’s no such thing as vampires,’” I finger-quote at her. “I keep hearing that. Even from people who know better.”
“But that’s—” She peers at me. “Bob?”
I peer back at her, confused. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
I shake my head. I’m feeling distinctly fuzzed. “I found them. Genuine no-shit vampires.” I motor on, anticipating her resistance and not wanting this to turn into another argument: “As in, they’re super-strong, can project at least a level three glamour, are predisposed for the practice of ritual magic, and they need factor-one-million sunblock to go outside in daylight. Oh, they also drink blood. Unfortunately I didn’t find them fast enough; Mhari got there first and reactivated herself and now HR are running in circles trying to draw up a policy for handling their Special Needs.”
“What? Mary who, hang on, wasn’t she your . . .”
“Yes, her. Mhari Murphy. Back from the land of the merchant bankers and even crazier and more ambitious, in a blonde-executive-with-sharp-shoulder-pads-and-sharper-fangs kind of way.”
Mo stares at me for a moment, clearly wondering if I’ve taken leave of my senses. Then she takes another sip of whisky and sits back, the gears visibly beginning to mesh. “You’ve verified this, I take it.”
“Oh hell yes.” I count off points on my fingers. “Epidemiological factors—we’ve got a whole new thaumodegenerative neuropathy to deal with, tentatively called V syndrome. Andy can vouch for my research on the data mining side. That’s all logged confidential OPERA CAPE. Then we’ve got the HR briefing and the DRESDEN RICE committee, currently sitting. The clusterfuck when I confronted them, well, you can find it filed under BLUE DANDELION. And I just set up another one, GREEN LIME, although we haven’t got very far yet. That one is investigating the possibility that for some time now we’ve been infested with fang fuckers telling everyone to shut up and look the other way because there’s no such thing as vampires.”
There’s an odd double-thud. I look round: Spooky has teleported from the extractor hood to the worktop and is now sniffing the electric kettle suspiciously.
“Vampires? You’re sure? That can’t be right . . .”
“They’re not fucking Dracula but they’re close enough for government work. It’s fallout from an algorithm research group supporting the quantitative trading desks at one of our larger banks. Turns out a rather rare combination of a multidimensional visualization system and a particular area of group theory makes mild-mannered mathematicians grow fangs. Anyway, the first of them only turned about five or six weeks ago. He turned his colleagues, and they went all agile on it, exploring the parameters, which triggered the V syndrome spike in Tower Hamlets which led me to them.”
“Where does Mhari come into all this?” Mo asks, still sounding confused. “I thought she got shown the door, years ago?”
“Too right. She was on the permanent sabbatical list. Trouble is, they showed her the door by way of an entrance interview with an investment bank. She’s been management track ever since and ended up as second in command on this team. So they turned her. And she knew about us, so she phoned it in and, as an ex-HR body, she knew exactly how to induct her little bat-buddies into the Laundry. Did it in the nick of time, too, just before I turned up with an OCCULUS truck and half of Special Branch in tow.”
“Oh good god.” Mo doesn’t believe in any gods other than the ones I believe in, but the expostulation comes instinctively.
“I know it’s not a bunch of bloody-handed lunatics from the Middle East, love, but I have had my hands ever so slightly full this past week . . .”
“Vampires.” She takes another sip of whisky. Her shoulders are shaking with suppressed laughter or anger or something. “Blood-sucking fiends.” More shaking. I can’t tell whether it’s mirth or hysteria, which worries me. “Poor Bob!”
“Maaaaow?”
I ignore the cat. “It’s not funny,” I say stiffly. “They drink blood. Not much, but the donors die of something like Krantzberg syndrome.”
“A-HAHAhaha—” It’s like a sneeze, and it passes just as fast. “What?”
“I said, their victims die. I’m guessing there’s a sympathetic connection. Whatever gives them their vampiric superpowers is like the K syndrome parasite, but instead of chewing down on their own gray matter, it uses them as a vector—to take blood meals that allow them to sample many more victims.”
“Oh. Oh shit.” She drains the glass. “What are you going to do about it?”
“What can I do?” The tea’s brewed; I pour myself a mug. “Right now we don’t even know if they have to drink blood to survive, or if it’s optional. Right now we’re still gathering data. Right now I suspect we’ve had a fang fucker in the organization all along, telling us they don’t exist. The intensity of collective denial has been, shall we say, anomalous.” Spooky, tired of being ignored, starts gently bumping her head against my ankle. “But if you could keep your eyes open, I’d be very grateful. Coordinate with Gerry and Angleton and Andy. I’ve got a bad feeling about this . . .”
• • •
IT IS TRADITIONAL, AT THIS JUNCTURE IN THE NARRATIVE, TO insert yet another Hollywood-style montage of diligent bureaucrats sleeplessly combing the archives in search of clues to the identity of the enemy mole within their organization. (Optional: one of them is stabbed in the jugular by said mole while working late. They use their last five minutes not to call for an ambulance, but to compose an amusing cryptogram naming their assailant, and to finger-paint it on the underside of their desk using their own blood as ink. Where it is found the next morning by Facilities and promptly cleaned up before anyone with a clue gets to see it.)
Well fuck that shit.
What actually happens is called Division of Labor, with a nod and a wink to security protocols. Andy and I send Pete away to draw up a questionnaire about vampires and why people think they don’t exist, emphasis on the “why.” We want to find out if vampire denialism is a statistical anomaly, so we plan to use his church as a control cohort. If anyone asks he can soft-soap it as an enquiry into the level of belief in supernatural phenomena among his parishioners. (We remind him to keep this away from Alex for the time being.)
Andy has a whole bunch of clearances for keyword access to confidential files. I have a whole bunch of clearances for etcetera. We’re not going to search secret sources at this point—the flaming hoops we’d have to ju
mp through would leave us seriously scorched. As it is, our confidential clearances overlap but are disjoint sets, so we go to the Security Coordination desk and ask the blue-suiter on duty to generate lists specific to each of us and a shared list we can split down the middle. We both have blanket permission for archive searches on anything over a century old, and for newer stuff that’s classified but has passed its expiration date. (This being the Laundry we don’t publish our declassified archives for the general public, but employees can get access more or less at will once it has expired.) Most of this material is available from our computerized document retrieval system these days, so it’s a lot like doing a university library literature search, except grubbier and more esoteric.
Search keyword: vampire.
Searching.
19,260 results. Listing page 1 of 771 . . .
Did you know that if you search for “vampire” in books on amazon.com you will get approximately 33,770 results?
We don’t have quite that many documents on the topic—a lot of our search hits are duplicates—but it looks as if, for a long period (from about 1792 through 1969), every single vampire novel published in the United Kingdom was read and synopsized by our Occult Entities Monitoring Desk, or the Zoological Enquiry Bureau, or the Linnean Anomalies Committee. (It got renamed every couple of decades, like clockwork.) I am absolutely gobsmacked to discover this. I already knew that we had far more information about unicorns on file than seems strictly necessary to anyone without EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN clearance, but vampires? You can’t even write it off as the work of a single demented fan; not when it ran for 177 years. (Well, 153 years. We have synopses going back to 1792, but the first folios didn’t get compiled until 1816.)
But wait, there’s more! There is a once-classified (Top Secret, fifty-year rule) file on one Abraham Stoker of London (d. April 20th, 1912). It’s quite thick and appears to contain a bunch of PV interview records with his friends and family, for pre–First World War values of positive vetting. (Full of comments along the lines of, “Jolly good chap, eminently clubbable for an Irishman.”) I checked with HR, and there’s no record that we ever employed him.
There’s a report of an investigation, circa 1899, into the book Dracula, which appears to have investigated the possibility that it was based on fact (and drew a blank). A much more urgent investigation into The Lair of the White Worm followed in 1912, but Mr. Stoker was indisposed to answer questions in person, and the investigator hinted darkly that “excited delirium due to an unspeakable ailment” had more to do with the phantasmagoric (not to say misogynistic) visions in that book than any supernatural experience.
There are all sorts of other things, investigations into silent movies and TV serials (I pulled the file on “Quatermass” for shits and giggles—strictly speaking not germane to the project in hand, but I’d hit burn-out by that point and badly needed some relief reading that wasn’t the eleventh Harry Dresden novel). As I implied earlier, the frequency of reports tailed off after the late 1950s, until there were only a couple a year coming in. And then everything stopped dead, as if guillotined, on April 5, 1969.
April 5th. You know what that means to me? That means the budget for the project expired at the end of financial year 1968 and was not renewed. (Yes, British government budgets—and the tax year—start on April 6th. Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t your tax years start and stop on a random date in April?)
I finally save the spreadsheet I’ve been using to keep track of this shit, mutter “bingo” quietly, and email Pete and Andy, inviting them to an impromptu team-building exercise in the Turk’s Head round the corner. Trebles all round: I’ve found what I’m looking for.
• • •
MEANWHILE, IN ANOTHER OFFICE, A MEETING IS TAKING PLACE. And I haven’t been invited to it, or even informed of it. Even though I’m the subject.
Mahogany Row in the New Annex lacks the plush nineteenth-century gentleman’s club ambiance of the original, but it’s still a step up from our regular offices (both figuratively and literally: it’s on the top floor). It has thicker carpets and nicer bathrooms. There are no cubicles, and some of the offices have outer vestibules for the executive PAs. However, the New Annex was built in the 1970s, so it lacks a whole bunch of modern conveniences we grunts take for granted. Who’d spec out a desk with a blotter and a rotary-dial telephone but no power and network points for laptops, or even electric typewriters?
Nevertheless. Sometimes it’s a good idea to have an office that is discreetly shielded—no outside windows, no electrical appliances except the carefully checked overhead lights, and Faraday shielding hidden behind the Laura Ashley wallpaper. And it’s in one of these offices that a conclave of old monsters are having an informal chat.
“Are we secure?” asks Lockhart.
“Yes.” Angleton laces his fingers together and looks at the third man present, who nods mildly. This worthy is the Senior Auditor, and the mere idea that he might be taking an interest in my affairs—well, it’s a good thing I have no idea about this meeting, or I’d be hiding under Spooky’s litter tray and gibbering instead of dragging Pete and Andy off for a wee celebratory bevvy down the pub. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. Neither the Auditor nor Lockhart bother to ask just how Angleton knows they are secure: some capabilities are simply trusted to exist.
“What’s the latest news, then?” asks the Senior Auditor. With his silver hair, gray suit, and half-moon reading glasses he could pass for a distinguished partner in a law or accountancy firm. But even the likes of Angleton and Lockhart are slightly on edge in his presence.
“Hmm.” Lockhart glances sidelong at Angleton.
“Well.” Angleton grins—an expression strangely at home on his sallow face, but rarely seen by the likes of me. “I had to give the lad a nudge, Gerry. But I think he’s probably working along the right lines now.” The grin vanishes abruptly. “He appeared to be distracted.”
“Hmm.” Lockhart glances down at the day planner in his lap. “Well, that’s not surprising. Unfortunately Agent CANDID may be becoming a stability issue, and he’d be the first to know. That business out east: shocking.”
The Senior Auditor nods. “But there is clearly a matter of priorities for us to discuss here,” he says smoothly. “We have benefited from two excellent assets meshing frictionlessly for too long. Or at least, providing each other with mutual support.”
“But the current enquiry . . .” Lockhart’s mustache twitches.
“It was inevitable, I’m afraid. As with all such phenomena, the closer the great alignment comes, the more frequently we’ll have to deal with outbreaks like this. Especially when inside meddling is implicated. Sooner or later one of our night-crawling friends was bound to make a power play: or perhaps it’s just another of their interminable duels. It’s just unfortunate for us that the nexus in question involves Agent CANDID’s partner’s former lover: the threat surface is wider than usual . . .” The Senior Auditor trails off into a thoughtful silence. “Agent CANDID, in combination with her instrument, is a major offensive asset. We can’t permit trivial insults to jeopardize her efficiency.”
Angleton’s expression is stony, but he holds his counsel.
“That may be true,” Lockhart ventures, “but what about Agent HOWARD? He’s on the tier below, but coming along nicely. In the long term”—he glances sidelong at Angleton—“he may be an even more important asset.”
“I am aware of that,” says the Senior Auditor. A slight stiffening of his spine and a glint of light from his glasses causes Lockhart to purse his lips. “Now tell me about Ms. Murphy. And Mr. Menendez.”
Lockhart flicks through a few pages. “Oscar Menendez: nothing special. He’s your usual managerial overachiever, very bright, organizationally highly competent, and about as untrustworthy as—well, I wouldn’t have chosen to bring him in, let’s put it that way. He might be useful if he manages to avoid mak
ing any fatal errors of judgment in the short term, but for the time being I’d be inclined to put him in a padded box and throw away the key. He doesn’t really understand that we’re not playing by the rules he’s used to.”
“And Ms. Murphy?”
Lockhart’s mustache thins. “She’s much more interesting, if you ask me. We originally recruited her straight out of university, in more innocent days—the ‘if someone sees something’ dragnet was still practical back then. She was badly mishandled by her original managerial oversight people, let go, given a discharge placement in the bank, then turned out not to be a waste of space after all.”
“And now she’s back, as a vampire. And she actually kept her coven alive and survived as such for nearly six weeks. That’s quite an achievement.” The Auditor nods to himself.
“What is the life expectancy of a vampire in this day and age, anyway?” asks Lockhart.
“Ninety-six hours,” Angleton says drily. “It’s been shortening progressively ever since the 1960s. Although most of the initial die-off is down to the sane ones working out their likely fate and killing themselves to avoid it. If they survive longer than a year—vanishingly rare, these days—there’s no obvious upper limit.”
“Except for the ceilings imposed by epidemiology.”
“And fratricidal predation, yes.” Angleton meets the Senior Auditor’s gaze with his own unblinking expression. “Bob knows it is his duty to keep Ms. Murphy alive, for the sake of the organization. He’s a clever boy and he’ll work out the angles for himself. The risks, I believe, are that Ms. Murphy will underestimate and try to manipulate him, or that Agent CANDID will prove to be an insurmountable distraction rather than a pillar of strength.”
“Human relationships are so painfully messy.” The Senior Auditor looks away; he carefully removes his glasses and starts to polish their lenses with the end of his tie. “But for the greater good . . .”
“If Agent HOWARD expresses concern about Agent CANDID, I believe he will come to me in the first instance,” says Angleton. “So we will have sufficient warning. It would be expedient to have an urgent assignment ready for her, though.”
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