Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  (Another pause.) “Well, that tears it.”

  “There’s still time to cauterize the canker before it putrefies, George. But I can’t do this on my own. You’ll have to move, and move fast. Marianne and I are luring our next targets away from the security cordon, and we have dragged a lot of their guards along for the ride—it’s an ambush, in case it isn’t obvious. But we can only keep them away from the New Annex for about two hours. Then the entire house of cards will collapse.”

  “Bastard! You planned this! You set me up!”

  “Not well enough, I’m afraid. The best laid plans of mice and men, etcetera. It’s all very unfortunate. Someone needs to go into the New Annex office building and liquidate the control team that the Laundry has established to stalk us. For obvious reasons, it cannot be me.”

  (Tightly.) “What can I expect to find?”

  “Two Auditors. One DSS who I know nothing about—he’s not in the declassified archives. A bunch of chair-warmers. And the site security I outlined in the briefing document.”

  “You’ll owe me for this.”

  “Yes-yes, of course. But can you do it? Or have the decades of sitting on your arse in your nice warm club rotted the sinews, old chap?”

  “You’ll owe me blood.”

  Click.

  • • •

  AT PRECISELY HALF PAST FIVE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, TWO helmeted figures slip out of the side entrance of the New Annex, slink down an alleyway, then unchain and climb aboard a tricked-out Vespa. The rider—Pete—seems no more or less suspicious than is to be expected, but the passenger—Alex—is clearly as twitchy as a TWOCer who suspects a police stakeout. It’s not surprising (Pete, after all, isn’t the tethered goat in this scenario, he’s just the driver) but it’s worrying.

  I watch them via a battery-powered wireless webcam glued to the shutters on the betting shop opposite the alley entrance. I’m sitting in front of a laptop in the cramped back of a bright crimson box on wheels that proclaims itself to be a City of London Fire Brigade Major Incident Command Vehicle. It’s not; it’s an OCCULUS truck. Fire Incident Command Vehicles don’t carry wiry-looking taciturn guys in black webbing and urban/nighttime camo uniforms, or an unfeasibly large number of guns. “Decoy is moving,” I announce. I’m wearing a headset and mike and a webbing/camo outfit of my own, albeit lighter on the guns and heavier on the occult accessories. “Turning left left left into the high street—”

  “On it. Moving out.” The narrator is “Scary” Spice, who I’ve worked with on other occasions, and who currently doesn’t have any army rank I understand—he’s some sort of “civilian contractor,” having graduated from being a sergeant in the territorial SAS a couple of years ago. “Eyes up, guys.”

  There’s a loud rumbling noise from somewhere in front as our driver guns the engine, then a distant wail of air horns as he switches on the blues and twos.

  (I had to warn Pete: “Do not be tempted to shoot amber lights or exceed the speed limit. Remember you’re leading a twelve-ton truck full of men with guns who will be very annoyed if they lose track of you. But not as annoyed as Alex will be if they lose track of him, and our adversary doesn’t.”

  (“Spoilsport.” The vicar snorted. “As if I’d do that . . .”)

  We drive for about fifty minutes, heading north and then east until we hit the North Circular at rush hour. The North Circular moves for no man, even if he’s got flashing blue lights and enough firepower to start World War Z. Inevitably we lose Pete and Alex for a while. But then I get a call from the traffic ops control room for North London, where our friends in blue are keeping a special eye open for a vicar and a vampire on a Vespa. (They’re also keeping an eye on the warehouse via CCTV, but we don’t want any obvious watchers on-site before we arrive, lest they spook the target.) The North Circular is okay for this sort of long-distance tail—it has more traffic cameras than Spooky the cat had fleas. I relay to the cab: “He’s about a kilometer ahead of us, still on the A406 westbound. Due to turn right onto Neasden Lane North . . .”

  My phone rings. It’s Pete; he’s got a hands-free helmet. “Hi, Bob—I seem to have lost you. Where are you? I’m going to pull over—”

  “No, don’t do that. We’ve got you on camera; you’re about a kilometer ahead of us. We’re stuck in that tailback on the North Circular you passed a couple of minutes ago. You should on no account stop moving. If necessary, if we haven’t gotten free of this, you should ride on past the Watford turnoff, join the M25 anti-clockwise at junction 21A, then leave it again at 1A and take Western Avenue back in until you hit the North Circular again. But don’t stop moving. If you stop you become a target. Do you copy?”

  “Don’t stop, loop around the M25 and North Circular if you can’t shake the traffic.” I feel a sudden lurch as the big truck begins to move again. “Got it.”

  He disconnects. I don’t cross my fingers or clutch my nonexistent rabbit’s foot, but I check my ward (a heavy-duty item I checked out this morning), pat the belt holster with my G17, and take a deep breath. Mo will kill me if I let anything happen to Pete. (Hell, she nearly killed me already, just for asking him to read a dubious Bible translation.)

  Someone nudges my shoulder. “You okay, Bob?” asks my neighbor. It’s Warrant Officer Howe, and if he’s sounding concerned rather than ripping my lungs out through my left ear I must be a pretty picture. (Either that or he’s afraid I’ll go nonlinear, like the way things turned out that time at Brookwood.) I dredge up a reassuring smile from somewhere. “Pre-op nerves,” I say. “I’ll be okay once it shakes down.”

  More juddering and acceleration and braking as we roll along, doing the lights and siren thing. My phone rings again. “Bob?” It’s Pete. “I have you in my rearview mirror so I’m proceeding to the warehouse. Bye.”

  “Decoy has us in sight and is proceeding to target location,” I announce over the intercom.

  “Wait one,” says Scary. “Please repeat.”

  “Decoy confirmed he has us in rearview mirror and is accordingly proceeding to target location,” I repeat.

  “Negative, Howard, decoy is out of sight.”

  “What!” I stop. Obviously there’s more than one fire engine out and about tonight. “I’ll check with traffic control.” I start poking at the airwave radio, trying to remember my cop-speak. Why didn’t we slap a GPS transponder on the bike? Don’t be silly, Bob, it takes time to requisition those things and if everyone does their job properly it won’t be necessary . . .

  “Scooter registration LB59KPT is on the A411 London Road, northbound towards Watford,” the dispatcher tells me.

  Well shit. That puts Pete well ahead of us. He’ll be there almost five minutes before we catch up. “Is there any way to make this thing go faster?” I ask Scary. Meanwhile I speed dial Pete on my phone. And that’s where Murphy’s Law takes over, because he picks up the phone, and the call drops immediately. I dial again. And again. The third time it goes straight through to voice mail. “Hello, you have reached the voice mail of the Reverend Peter Wilson. I’m sorry I’m not able to speak right now; if you leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, you may find these parish numbers helpful . . .”

  “Decoy’s phone not responding,” I tell everyone. “We’ve lost contact.”

  “Okay, hang on to your ’nads,” says Scary. “Hit it,” he adds, possibly forgetting that he has a hot mike. The driver floors the accelerator and tries to bounce my brain out of my skull. I just hope we haven’t left it too late.

  • • •

  PETE PULLS INTO THE SMALL CAR PARK BEHIND THE KGB.2.YA warehouse and switches off the ignition. He looks around. It’s dark and the industrial estate is nearly deserted, dimly lit by sodium lights that cast long shadows across the concrete and tarmac. The metal-clad buildings hunch like the shells of long-dead giant tortoises. There’s a single cheap hatchback car parked out in f
ront, and a cheerful light glows from the office window beside the front door. Pete climbs off the scooter, then holds the handlebars while Alex disentangles himself and fumbles with his helmet strap. “Is this it?” he asks anxiously. “Where is everyone?”

  “It’s always like this, apparently,” Pete replies, looking round. “And don’t worry about the others. Bob’d let us know if they were delayed again.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.” Alex shivers. He’s been doing a lot of that lately, and not because he’s cold—as a regular cyclist, even in winter, he’s used to it: his hoodie and trousers are up to the job of keeping him warm on the back of a bike. But he’s still suffering from the culture shock of having migrated from academia into the pressure-cooker intensity of the Scrum, and the Laundry is even worse in some ways, combining the dingy institutional conservativism of a particularly stuffy Oxbridge college with the stuff of nightmares. It seems to be staffed by a curious mixture of battle-axe civil servants, slightly demented CS/math geeks like Howard, and scary old men who smile at you in a way that is simultaneously friendly and horrifying, like a hangman sizing you up for a noose. And then they explain that some lunatic is trying to kill you, has in fact already murdered Evan quite horribly, and that they expect you to quietly walk in front of a bus to see if the driver hits the brakes in time—

  —And you can’t seem to think of a reason to say “fuck! no!” before your hands are fumbling with a motorcycle helmet and you’re sitting on a scooter behind a vicar, and then facing a locked door on an industrial estate with who-knows-what beyond it—

  —Alex makes a complex gesture with the fingers of his left hand, in the privacy of his jacket pocket. Then he pulls out his hulking great tablet of a phone and discreetly fires up an app he flung together in a frenzy of focussed hacking overnight. And which he hasn’t told anybody about. Because, well, if they won’t take him into their confidence, why should he take them into his?

  “Let’s go in,” suggests Pete. He steps forward and pulls out a bunch of keys. Then he pauses and pushes the intercom button. Pushes it again. There’s a brief crackle. “Wilson and Schwartz from Capital Laundry Services,” he says. The lock buzzes and he pushes the door open, pocketing his keys again. He glances over his shoulder just once. “That’s funny,” he says. “I wonder where they are? It’s jolly hard to hide a truck that size—”

  Alex follows, pushing the door wide open and steps across the threshold. At once he feels a pricking in his fingertips and a buzzing like angry wasps in the small leather fetish-bag they made him wear on a thong around his neck. His pupils dilate. “Something’s wrong—” he begins to say.

  Everything seems to take forever.

  There is a desk and a chair in the office behind the door, and the chair is occupied by a dead man, head lolling, eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling.

  The man in the chair is not alone.

  A tall, slim woman stands over him. Blonde hair, black leather jacket, black leggings—this is what Alex notices before he gets as far as the pistol she’s holding in one blue-plastic-gloved hand.

  “Kiss-kiss, boys.” She smiles, sweet as rat poison. “Over there, please.” She makes a minute gesture with the gun. “You”—to Pete—“kick the door shut.” Alex knows very little about guns (beyond the basics: that they’re machines for making holes in people, and being shot apparently hurts a lot) but it looks very black and there’s a fat cylinder sticking out in front, which can’t be good.

  “Are you going to kill us?” asks Alex, unable to keep a quaver out of his voice.

  “No.” Her smile turns sour. “Not that I don’t want to, you understand, but . . . orders.”

  “Don’t provoke her,” murmurs Pete.

  “Oh, I’m unprovokable.” Her hearing is acute, too. “It’s my vocation to cleanse the world of things like you.” Another smile, teeth aggressively bared. “Of bloodsuckers and their enablers.”

  “Why?” Alex asks, voice rising. “I haven’t done anything to you!”

  “If sheep had guns, would they tolerate the farmer just because he hasn’t done anything to them yet?” She motions with the pistol, in the direction of the closed inner door. “Open the door. Go inside. Close the door. Don’t make me impatient.”

  “What if I say no?” asks Alex, just as Pete tries to say, “You don’t have to do this, truly—”

  “Open the door, go inside, and close the door! Or I will shoot you in the kneecaps and drag you through the doorway myself!” Her sudden vehemence makes Alex jump.

  Pete reaches for the door handle. “What’s on the other side?” he asks.

  “Fucking do it.” She raises the gun, holding it two-handed, her eyes burning.

  “I’m going! I’m going!” Pete opens the door and shuffles through. Alex twitches, then cringes after him when he sees her expression. It’s the hunger of a tiger on a choke chain, in sight of its next meal but not permitted to approach. A moment later the door closes with a click.

  The woman (who is not called Marianne) relaxes slightly. She crosses the room and hurriedly turns a key in the lock on the inner door. She returns her pistol to an inner pocket. Then she sits down on the edge of the desk to wait for the next victims to show up, shivering with joyful anticipation. Her new patron has promised her his leftovers.

  • • •

  IF THERE IS ONE THING WORSE THAN VAMPIRES, IT WOULD HAVE to be vampire hunters.

  Consider: vampires are obligate predators. If they try not to feed, eventually the V-parasites get hungry and chow down on the host. Prudent vampires do not feed indiscriminately, and try to minimize their chances of being caught by picking one victim at a time, and fasting as long between victims as possible. But they are, of necessity, serial killers.

  Vampire hunters, on the other hand . . .

  A vampire hunter is a serial killer who hunts serial killers. Not only that: the serial killers they hunt are supernaturally strong ritual magicians with mind-control chops and an aptitude for occult magic.

  So I think it’s reasonable to say that vampire hunters either have an extremely short life expectancy, or constitute one of the most deadly threats you are ever likely to encounter. They are invariably howling-at-the-moon stark raving bonkers, and not in a good way. Nobody who wasn’t several screws short of a full set would ever consider hunting vampires for business or pleasure. (Especially because vampires don’t exist. Right? Right.) We are not talking Buffy here. Paging Dexter, Dexter to the white courtesy telephone . . . Both Buffy and Dexter are fictional characters, and kind of cute, because their creators want to entertain you, not scare you to death. The real thing is something else.

  Having established that vampire hunters are a whole bundle of no fun at all, it’s also important to bear in mind that vampire hunters can sometimes be a vampire’s best friend.

  Consider that the first law of the vampire club is that, if I can see you, I will kill you. But killing in person is messy, dangerous, and can backfire horribly: the risk of overexposure is very real. So smart, experienced, ancient vampires collect vampire hunters wherever possible—cherish them, feed them, keep them in a cotton-wool lined box, and only take them out when it’s time to point them at a rival and pull the trigger.

  Do I need to draw you a diagram to show the relationship between Old George, the fang fucker who is not called Marianne, and our mysterious adversary inside the Laundry (not to mention inside a crypt not far from the tomb of Karl Marx)? Yes? Well, it gets complex, like one of those optical-illusion 3D triangles that tries to turn your eyeballs inside out if you stare at it for too long. Let’s just say that right now they are all using each other for their own ends. George created Marianne as a proxy to kill rivals for him. The Rival has gaslighted him into loaning her to him. Marianne is happy because the Rival is feeding her play dates. The Rival, for his part, is using Marianne and George for his own ends in turn . . . and if any of them ever
slip up in one another’s presence, they will die.

  Which brings us back to the scenario I am describing. Not-Marianne is working for a new employer, who has asked her to guard a warehouse door. She has just herded a newbie vampire (and a vicar, by way of innocent bystanders) through it, into the presence of our internal adversary, who has secured her cooperation by promising them to her when he’s finished. Which is to say, he’s neatly detached her from Old George, who will now have to run his own bloody-handed errands. And he’s maneuvered Old George into a position where the only way to safety lies through the New Annex.

  Things are about to get very messy indeed, for blood-on-the-walls values of messy.

  17.

  CODE RED

  “GOOD EVENING, VICAR! AND YOU MUST BE ALEX, WHAT-WHAT? It’s a little cold in here: I’m afraid I couldn’t get the heaters to work. Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve made a pot.”

  Alex looks around the darkened warehouse. It’s not totally pitch-black: a couple of underpowered bulbs glimmer in the twilight, dangling on wires from the cross-beams. There’s enough light to see rows of shelving receding into the distance, rising to just below the ceiling, stacked with boxes and tubes and piles of paper on pallets. There are some work tables at the front of the space, and behind them stacks of enormous billboard-sized posters—

  The old man gestures at a teapot, surrounded by a neat cluster of mugs and an open half-pint carton of milk. His loose-skinned hand shakes quite noticeably as he picks up the teapot and begins to pour. “I come out here quite regularly. I find that creature comforts always make it slightly more bearable. Don’t you agree?”

  Alex nods, unable to break the sudden conviction that this is all a horrible dream.