Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  A few minutes later, the steep descent into the tunnel under the Thames cuts off the phone. When the car emerges at the other end, the phone is inactive, battery removed, SIM transferred to her purse for disposal along with the other evidence—and the e-ink number plate identifies the car as a different vehicle of the same make and model from the one parked outside the Seaman’s Mission earlier in the evening.

  All in all, it’s a good start to an excellent night’s work for the woman who is not called Marianne, and her new patron. But the best is yet to come.

  15.

  CLUB DEAD

  “AH, MR. SMITH! HOW GOOD TO SEE YOU! CAN I OFFER YOU something to drink?” asks the banker.

  “I don’t think so.” George sits down, uninvited, in the visitor’s chair opposite Sir David Finch’s desk. He wears an overcoat and leather gloves over a sober suit. Sir David is clearly unnerved by Old George’s unheralded appearance in his inner office—his PA didn’t put informal visit by major investor anywhere in his daily schedule, and it is in any case late enough that he was about to leave for home. “I’d just like to keep this quick, Sir David. My request the other week—did you act on it?”

  “Your request? Oh, the off-site meeting? Hmm.” Sir David frowns, and taps his fingers. “I’ll have to ask Sandra what happened to it. I don’t recall attending . . . no.” He pauses, about to touch the intercom on his desk. “Do you mind?”

  “Be my guest.” It’s delivered with an ironic half smile, but something about Old George’s manner gives Sir David the very peculiar feeling that perhaps he is here in this office by George’s grace and favor.

  “Thank you.” Sir David pushes the intercom button. “Sandra?”

  A couple of seconds pass. “Sir?” His PA’s response is tardy, annoying. She’s new on the job this past week while his regular, Andrea, is off sick.

  “The off-site meeting I asked for with Oscar Menendez and his team . . . what happened to it?”

  “Let me check? Oh I’m sorry, Sir David, there seems to have been some sort of scheduling problem. I’ve been trying to arrange a mutually convenient time for everyone, but there’s a logjam in the calendar system: Mr. Menendez is on some sort of secondment right now, and his team are either off sick, on vacation, or also on secondments. All of them! It’s most irregular and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it but HR say it’s entirely . . .”

  Sir David meets Old George’s quizzical stare. “Thank you, Sandra,” he says. “That will be all.” He hesitates for a moment. “I won’t be needing you anymore this evening, you can go home now.” He releases the call button. “Well?”

  Old George nods to himself, but holds his counsel.

  “What’s going on?” asks Sir David.

  “I really don’t think you want to ask that question.”

  Sweat beads on Sir David’s forehead. “I in-insist.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m su-supposed to keep the board informed of all developments. How did you get in here? What’s going on? Why are you asking about Oscar’s team?”

  “Fancy that.” George stares at the banker. “An intelligent question at last. What a shame.”

  “What? What’s going on?”

  George looks away. “Imagine what it’s like to be more than two hundred years old and not to have seen the sun rise once in all those years. Imagine what it’s like to be an adept at the peak of one’s powers, immune to the depredations of K syndrome, but utterly alone—the carrier of a parasite so disgusting that every man’s hand will be raised against you should they learn of it. Imagine yourself locked in a duel to the death with the only other one of your kind in London, a duel that has been in progress for nearly a century with no victory in sight. Imagine what it is like to wake one morning and discover that your enemy has placed a catspaw inside your finest experimental project, where their pawn has taken control of a nest of ignorant and deadly children who will inevitably bring the full power of the secret state down on their necks and, in all probability, yours. Imagine furthermore that the enemy has cozened you, concealing their intervention, portraying themselves as your ally, cajoling you to lend them your most powerful weapon when in fact the enemy plans to steal your work and then to expose you, to bring your centuries of secret labor to a premature end at the hands of the modern-day witch finders. Imagine, Sir David, the end of all you ever wanted brought about because an idiot banker did not prioritize highly enough a simple request from their master . . .”

  George rises and walks over to the curtains that cover the floor-to-ceiling office windows. He parts them carefully and looks out across the glittering nightscape of the East End. The view from thirty stories up is breathtaking; the dust and pollution rendered invisible by distance, the glory of the lights magnified in contrast. He opens the curtains fully and turns to stand with his back to the city. “Forget you asked.”

  “What was the question again?” Sir David’s expression is vague, like a dreamer prematurely awakened.

  Old George stares hard at Sir David, who freezes, his mouth ajar. A string of spittle begins to slide from one side of a paralyzed lip.

  George pauses. “How annoying.” He peers at Sir David. “I do believe you are developing some degree of resistance.” Two strides take him across the room and back to the table—Sir David has barely had time to stand up. “Sit down,” he snarls, putting the full force of his will behind the command.

  “But—”

  “Down.” Old George stands over the banker and places his hands on the man’s shoulders, pushing gently. Skin contact reinforces compulsion. Sir David sinks back into his chair, confused.

  “I think you were just telling me how depressed you are feeling. Pressure of work and all that. Despondent and low. Positively suicidal in fact. Isn’t that so, Sir David?”

  “G-g-gug. Ugh.” Sir David shudders.

  “Sir David, why don’t you write a note? Something brief and touching, explaining how guilty you feel about the manner in which Oscar Menendez manipulated you into giving him unsupervised control of a hundred-million-pound trading fund. Or perhaps you could confess to your sleepless nights worrying about the millions of pensioners and orphans starving to death for want of the money your enterprise looted from their retirement funds.” George grimaces. “I think that might be over-egging the pudding, on second thoughts. But write it anyway. It’ll make you feel so much better, won’t it?”

  Sir David picks up a pen from his desk set, and retrieves a leather-bound planner from one drawer. His motions are jerky, almost robotic. He begins to write rapidly, scrawling spiky glyphs across a page as Old George walks back to the window unit. He uses a compact tool to loosen the bolts that secure one of the corner window units in place. Sir David has almost filled a page with a rambling confessional of his inner turmoil by the time Old George peels away the gasket around the glazing unit.

  “Jolly good. Sir David, if you could step over here, please?”

  Sir David shuffles towards the window. Old George is ready for him: holding the waist-high railing with one hand, he pushes hard against the glazing unit with the other. It resists for a few seconds, then pops free, tumbling away into the night. A gust of chilly air rushes in, and Sir David takes half a step back. “No—”

  “You are depressed, Sir David. Mortally tired. You really need a break.” George takes him by the shoulder and propels him into the void. “It’s only traditional,” he adds. There is a faint scream, abruptly cut off.

  His informant disposed of, Old George glances around the office incuriously. There’s a minor gale blowing through the hole in the glass wall; he walks over to the desk, locates the suicide note, and places the multitool atop it as a macabre paperweight. Then he picks up Sir David’s telephone handset in one gloved hand and dials an outside line. He waits for a minute as the call connects through to a voice mail number, punches in four digits, and replaces the receiver.

  The
n he leaves the office, merging with the homebound employees as they trickle out into the sheltering night.

  He will deal with the rest of the loose ends tomorrow.

  • • •

  “YOU’RE A COMPLETE BASTARD, BOB.”

  “Yes.”

  “You—no, wait. You make me feel dirty. Like you’ve been cheating on me.”

  I can’t be bothered to remind Mhari that we have not, in fact, been in a meaningful interpersonal relationship this decade—or that last time we were, she was the one who was sleeping around. (Mostly in an attempt to get my attention, I think. Or maybe to punish me for something I hadn’t done. I’m slow on the uptake, but I can figure it out eventually.) “You’re feeling dirty because you’ve just discovered that this isn’t a game. Congratulations, Mhari. Are you feeling thirsty?”

  She glares at me, and for a moment I think I’ve gone too far. Her eyes are still cornflower blue but my inner vision shows me red-rimmed holes in a wall fronting a nightmare, glowing red worms writhing in a shimmering furnace . . . I blink. “You bastard, Bob. Of course I’m thirsty! It’s eating me up. Burning away at me, a constant ache. But now I’ve got anorexia. Thanks to you.”

  “Well.” The wreckage of a very expensive meal sits strewn across the table between us. “We have a problem to solve, don’t we?”

  “What problem?” Her blank-faced stare is even more worrying than her anger.

  “How to keep you alive!” I snap. She recoils.

  “What?”

  “Listen. This is London. Eight million people, give or take: a hundred thousand deaths a year, on average. Twenty thousand terminal cancers. Ten thousand strokes. And so on. You need blood to establish a sympathetic link that allows the V-parasite to feed: you can probably make do with a tiny amount. And you don’t need to feed very often. If it’s taken from a donor who’s waiting for the transplant surgeons to break them up for spares, if it’s used immediately, that’s not going to shorten their life appreciably. Taken from someone dying of advanced metastatic cancer who’s on so much morphine they think it’s next Friday already, ditto. We’ll need to find a cooperative hospice, or a hospital with terminal care facilities. And a cooperative consultant or two. We can arrange for blood samples to be taken from patients who’re within forty-eight hours of death and have them couriered over to where you and the other PHANGs are waiting to consume it immediately. We can make this work, Mhari, but it’s not going to happen unless you can give the organization a reason to want to keep you alive. Do you understand?”

  She nods—reluctantly, I think. I can’t tell if I’ve gotten through her layer of defensive self-loathing or not. I try again. “I keep hearing, everybody knows vampires don’t exist. And you know what? That phrase, that conviction, will kill you if you can’t overcome it. And it’ll kill Alex, and, uh, Evan, and Mr. Menendez, and what’s-her-name-with-the-spikey-hairdo-and-bad-attitude—”

  “Janice.”

  “Janice. It’ll kill you all if we can’t work out where it’s coming from. And even if we get past it, we’ve then got to justify why we’re going to take elaborate and dangerous measures to keep you alive, measures which are frankly repulsive to most right-thinking people—think of the newspaper headlines if it got out; it’d look worse than the hospital that was saving up organs from autopsies on dead children—we need a justification. Just being powerful ritual practitioners who are immune to K syndrome isn’t going to be enough: you need to bring some added value to the organization. This is not office politics as usual. This is deadly serious: if not now, then in twenty years’ time. Or weren’t you planning on being around in another couple of decades?” I meet her eye. “Oh hell, Mhari, don’t be stupid.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s awful,” she says. “This can’t be happening.”

  “Tomorrow. The next DRESDEN RICE meeting is two o’clock, isn’t it? I’ll see you there. We need to shock the other attendees out of the whole denial thing, and propose a, a liaison with the Blood and Transplant Service to procure essential supplies from terminal cases. And also to come up with a list of things PHANGs can do that will justify the expense of keeping you alive. Hmm: why don’t you look into areas of occult research that are currently off-limits due to K syndrome? It’d give you a unique edge.” I pause. “That’s not what you were planning, is it.”

  “No, I—I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “Oscar had other ideas.”

  “Your boss Mr. Menendez is a charismatic corporate sociopath who did just fine in banking, Mhari. His problem is that the Laundry is not a merchant bank. If he tries to play us like fools he’ll end up like Bridget and Harriet. Or worse.”

  “Like—what? Oh.” Word gets around: what happened to Bridget and Harriet is legendary, and not in a good way. Evidently it even got as far as Mhari. She stares at me, wide-eyed. “You really think the organization would make arrangements for us? In spite of, of what you just told me?”

  Spare me the baby-vamp naiveté. “I see no reason why not: we’ve done deals with worse beings before. But you’ll have to work at justifying it, not just plan a—whatever.” There is no point in mentioning what I think this was about. Mhari didn’t drag her old ex out to a posh dinner just to pump him for gossip. She had some sort of scheme in mind, probably involving making me an offer I couldn’t refuse: at a guess it involved immortality, super-strength, photophobia, and a taste for Rhesus Positive. Only it went out of the window almost immediately. Probably when she worked out that I’m pretty much immune to her glamour, and not entirely natural myself. (Score: hungry ghosts one, vampires nil.) It was definitely off the cards by the time I got around to telling her the truth and she finished throwing up in self-loathing. “Go into the meeting with a laundry list of useful things PHANGs can do. I’ll tag-team with you on the support arrangements. And together we can try and work them around to believing that there’s actually a problem in need of a solution.”

  “Huh.” Mhari puts her fork down. At last. I relax infinitesimally. When she was getting worked up a few minutes ago I was half-convinced she was going to stab me in the eye. “You’ve changed more than I thought, Bob.”

  I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “Haven’t we both?”

  “Well.” She looks at me speculatively. I notice that her pupils are dilated: I seem to have got her attention.

  “There are a couple of other angles to cover,” I add.

  “Such as?”

  “Firstly. That fucking reading assignment. I want it off the agenda.”

  “The reading—” She pauses. Sighs dramatically, miming disappointment, as she pulls the tattered shreds of normality back together. “Spoilsport.”

  “You’re the chair. I do not want a teacher’s black mark for failing a homework assignment. But if you want me to help save your ass I don’t need the distraction.”

  “Well, if you put it that way . . . What was the other thing?”

  “Oh, nothing significant.” I glance away from her face for a moment. “Just, I’m fairly sure someone is going to try to kill you. I mean, kill all the PHANGs. It’s the only explanation for what’s going on. Trouble is, I’m not sure who’s going to do it, or why. So, um, I’m going to have to keep an eye on you. I don’t expect them to try anything violent at first; using the committee to starve you into going rogue would be a much better tool . . . But we need to keep up appearances. I don’t want to spook whoever it is before I can identify them. So if you could avoid mentioning this to the others just yet?” I reach into my pocket and pull out a small jewelry box and pass it across the table to her.

  “What—”

  “Open it.” She opens the box. Normally I like watching pretty women open boxes containing rings I’ve just given them. It’s not something I get to do very often, truth be told. But this is business not pleasure, and I catch Mhari’s frown as she stares at it. “Yes, that’s a sympathetic link you can feel. Go on,
put it on.” She slides it onto her right middle finger, an unadorned loop of silver. I haul out the matching ring and try and work it onto my admittedly thicker digit. “This is the other one. Pinch it—ouch! Yes, like that.”

  “What’s it for?” she asks.

  I shove a form across the table towards her. “Sign here, twice. Yes, against the Xs. It’s so that if someone tries to kill you, you can contact me. In fact, if someone tries to kill you it’ll let me know even if you’re unconscious.” Or dying, I don’t add. “And it’ll let me find you.”

  “What’s wrong with the phone?”

  “A fearless vampire hunter is chasing you with a stake and you’ve got time to phone me? This is simpler, is all. Also, it doesn’t rely on batteries and it works in mobile phone black spots and on the underground.”

  “Okay.” She passes me the paperwork and slides the box into her handbag. A curious expression crosses her face. “I can’t believe you just gave me a ring and I put it on.”

  “Would it have changed anything if I’d done it ten years ago?” I ask.

  “Probably not.” She stares into some inner distance, then calls for the bill. “But who knows?”

  • • •

  I’M IN A HUDDLE/INFORMAL CONCLAVE/MEETING WITH ANDY AND Pete when the phone rings.

  It’s late afternoon, the day after my questionable date. I spent the morning, as threatened, dealing with various bits of paperwork and then trying to work out a possible protocol for how we might organize necessary blood bank supplies for a small cell of PHANGs with minimum risk of public exposure, minimum risk of private embarrassment—we are going to have to run this past the Auditors with an eye to legality and compliance with the operations code, for starters, and don’t get me going on how feeding blood from terminal patients to vampires is going to play out in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years on the medical ethics side—and minimum risk of being derailed by any idiots with axes to grind and an unreasoning prejudice against bloodsucking creatures of the night. Then I broke for lunch (don’t get me started on the spaghetti bolognese, either), and then an efficiently run session chaired by an unusually subdued Mhari.