“Are you ready to begin?” Jo asks.
I nod.
Jo pulls out a notepad and a voice recorder, then her official warrant card. She holds it up and my eyes are drawn to it, with a swelling, stabbing sensation in my forehead as if a swarm of bees have taken up residence between my ears. “By the power vested in me in the name of the state, by the oath of service you have sworn under penalty of your mortal soul, I bind you to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
Not ask, or order, but bind. My tongue feels swollen, as if I’m having an allergic reaction. I manage to nod.
“State your name, rank, and date of birth.”
I feel my lips move and hear a voice reciting. Iris is watching me closely, her expression hard to read. It’s okay: I feel comfortably numb. I want to tell her, but my voice isn’t having anything to do with my mind right now.
“Yesterday morning, June fourteenth, you met with Detached Special Secretary Angleton in his office. Describe the meeting.”
It’s funny, I didn’t realize I could remember that much detail. But the geas drags it out of me over the course of an hour and a half, and by the end of it Jo is grimacing and wincing as her hand spiders back and forth across the pages of her report pad, filling it in verbatim—I’m not the only one whose muscles aren’t under my own control while the report field is in force.
Finally she draws breath again. “Is there anything you’d like to add for the record?” she asks, turning over a new page.
My mouth opens again, almost without me willing it: “Yes. I’m very sorry.” My jaw shuts with an audible click.
She nods sympathetically: “Yes, I suppose you would be.” She closes the report pad with a twitch, says, “The report is now over,” and switches off the voice recorder.
Iris sags. I follow suit a moment later, then Jo makes it a threesome. The wards on the cover of her R60 pad and voice recorder are glowing almost as brightly as the haunted instrument panel in Hangar Six. “Whwhat happens now?” I ask. My throat feels gravelly.
Jo glances at Iris, who raises that eyebrow again—the one that can shut down committees or terrify demons to order.
“I take this back to Oscar-Oscar, and have copies created under seal. One goes to Human Resources”—I try not to cringe—“one goes to the Auditors, and one goes to Internal Affairs. Everyone else involved in the incident gets the same treatment. IA put the collected transcripts—and the special coroner’s report on the victim—in front of the Incident Committee, who investigate and determine the cause of the event.”
I lick my lips. “And then?”
Jo shrugs uncomfortably. “If they find that the cause was negligence they throw it back at HR for an administrative reprimand. If they attribute it to malice they may action Internal Affairs to prosecute the case before the Black Assizes, but that requires evidence of actual criminal intent. Oh, and they copy Health and Safety on their findings, so H&S can issue guidelines to prevent a recurrence. Meanwhile the Auditors get a chance to muck in if anything catches their eldritch eye. But that’s basically it.”
She delivers this with her best poker face.
“And in practice . . . ?” Iris nudges.
“Do you really want to . . . ? Well, hmm.” Jo looks at me sidelong. “I’m not going to try to second-guess the Incident Committee, but it sounds to me like a straightforward mistake made by an overworked employee who hadn’t been fully briefed and was in a hurry to get back to his other duties. If it turns out that the victim wasn’t authorized to be in Hangar Six, the employee in question would be off the hook—up to a point. But Jesus, Bob!”
Her composure cracks; I hang my head before her dismay.
“I’ll not make that mistake next time,” I mutter, then try to swallow my tongue.
“There won’t be a next time,” Jo says vehemently. “What were you thinking, Bob?”
“I don’t know!”
Iris stands up. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Sullivan.” She angles herself towards the door, transparently urging Jo out.
“I’m out of here,” Jo says defensively as she stands up. “I’ll see you around, Bob. Hopefully under happier circumstances.”
I nod as she leaves. Iris sits down again and looks at me, frowning. “What are we going to do with you?” she asks.
“Um. I don’t understand?”
“To start with, you’re taking the rest of the week off work,” she says, and her expression tells me not to even think about arguing. “And when you come back in next Monday and not a day before, you’re off active duty for the rest of the month.”
“But Boris is shorthanded and Angleton needs—”
“They need you sane and fit for duty next month as well,” she says sharply. “And next year. You can pick up the cabling job you were speccing out, and the routine server upgrade, but you’re not to go tearing around banishing demons and shooting up cows until further notice. A couple of months of boredom won’t do you any harm, and more importantly, if it takes the stress off your shoulders so you’re less likely to make mistakes I’d call that a win. Wouldn’t you?”
I wince, but manage to nod.
“Good.” She unwinds a fraction. “You’re probably wondering why I’m giving you the velvet glove treatment. Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re now the focus of a fatal incident enquiry. You may or may not come out of it with your honor intact, but it is going to place you under stress. When people are under stress they’re more likely than usual to make mistakes, and I don’t think you’re any exception. So I’m not going to let you take on any hazardous jobs until this is sorted out. If you screw up and get yourself killed then—speaking as your line manager—I will follow you all the way to hell and kick you around the brimstone pits. Because letting you make further screwups due to stress would not only be an avoidable, hence senseless waste—it would be a black mark on my record.” There’s a peculiar, dangerous gleam in her eyes. “Are we singing from the same hymnbook yet?”
I nod again, slightly less reluctantly.
“Good. Now piss off home and leave the damage control to me.” She pulls up a strained smile, and I could cry. “Go on, it’s what I’m here for. Scram!”
I can take a hint: I scram.
IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT A SANE employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.
Unfortunately it’s also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen—it’s invisible and you don’t notice its presence until it’s gone, and then you’re sorry. The Laundry has a haphazard and inefficient approach to recruiting personnel: if you know too much you’re drafted. The quid pro quo is that we have to make do with whatever we get; consequently it should be no surprise to learn that our quality of management is famously random, governed only by the tiny shred of civil service protocol that sticks to the organization, and Human Resources’ spasmodic attempts to cover up the most egregious outrages.
As I already noted, I’ve had an unfortunate history with managers. I’m not a team player, I don’t suffer fools gladly, and I don’t like petty office politics. In a regular corporation they’d probably fire me, but the Laundry doesn’t work like that; so I get handed from manager to manager as soon as they figure out what I am, like the booby prize in a game of pass-the-parcel.
Iris showed up one morning and moved into the interior corner office that Boris had temporarily vacated—he was on assignment overseas, doing something secretive for MI5—with her bike helmet and a framed photograph of her husband on his Harley, and a bookshelf consisting of The Mythical Man-Month and a selection of mathematics texts. It was a whole week before she told me over coffee and a Danish that she was my new line manager, and was there anything she could do to make my job easier?
After she put the smelling salts away and I managed to sit up I confessed that yes, there were one or two things that needed minor adjustment. And—who knew?—the trivial annoyances fucked right off shortly thereafter.
Iris couldn’t do anything about my biggest headaches—as Angleton’s secretary, I get to carry his cans all the time—but she even managed to make him ease up a little in April, when I was overbooked for two simultaneous liaison committee meetings (one in London, one in Belgium) and he wanted me to go digging in the stacks for a file so vitally important that it had last been seen in the mid-1950s, slightly chewed on by mice.
I don’t know where in hell they found her, but as managers go she’s all I can ask for. I don’t know much about her home life—some Laundry staff socialize after work, others just don’t, and I guess she’s one of the compartmentalized kind—but she seems like the type of manager who learned her people skills in the process of steering a big, unruly family around, rather than in business school. The iron whim is tempered with patience, and she’s a better shoulder to cry on than any member of the clergy I’ve ever met. People who work for her actually want to make her happy.
Which goes some way towards explaining, I hope, what happened later—and why, when Iris ordered me to scram, I hurried to obey.
But not what I did on my way out of the office.
ANGLETON’S OFFICE IS DOWN A STAIRCASE AND ROUND A bend, in a windowless cul-de-sac that I’ll swear occupies the fitting rooms at the back of the M&S opposite C&A—I’ve never been able to make the geometry of this building line up. But that’s not surprising.
When the rest of us upped sticks and moved to the New Annexe two years ago (to make way for redevelopment of the old Service House site under some kind of public-private partnership deal), there was much headless-chicken emulation, and many committee meetings, and probably several stress-induced heart attacks due to the complexity of the relocation. Angleton didn’t show up to any of the planning meetings, ignored the memos and pre-uplift checklists and questionnaires, and cut the woman from Logistics and Relocation dead when she tried to shoulder-barge his office. But when we got to the end of it, what do you know? His office was at the bottom of the rear stairwell in the New Annexe, just as if it had always been there, green enameled metal door and all.
I could easily go home without passing his door, but I don’t. Now that the worst has come to pass, a gloomy curiosity has me in its grip. Why did he want me to go to Cosford? What was that guff about a white elephant? It’ll bug me for the rest of the week if I don’t ask the old coffin-dodger, and Iris told me to go home and relax. So I curve past the crypt on my way to the lich-gate, so to speak, and steel myself to beard the monster in his den.
(See, I’m calling him rude names. That’s to prove to myself that I’m not scared of him like everybody else. See? I’m not terrified!)
The dark green metal door’s shut when I come to it. But the red security light isn’t on, so I knock. “Boss?” I ask softly.
I hear a muffled noise, as of something very large and massive shuffling around in a confined space. Then there’s a grunt, and a heavy thud. I rest my palm lightly on the pitted brass door handle. “Boss?” I repeat.
Heavy breathing. “Enter.”
I push the door open, with trepidation.
Angleton’s office feels like it’s the size of a self-respecting broom closet, even though it’s actually quite large. All four walls are shelved floor-to-ceiling in ledgers—not books, but binders full of microfiche cards. In the middle of the room sits his legendary desk, an olive-drab monolith that looks like it came out of a Second World War aircraft carrier; a monstrous hump like a 1950s TV set sits on top of it, like a microfiche reader. Except that it isn’t. Microfiche readers don’t come with organ pedals and hoppers to gulp down mountains of cards. Angleton’s desk is a genuine Memex, the only one I’ve seen outside of the National Cryptologic Museum run by the NSA in Maryland.
To those who don’t need to know, Angleton is just a dry old guy who rides herd on the filing cabinets in Arcana Analysis and does stuff for the Counter-Possession Unit. His job title is Detached Special Secretary, which doesn’t mean what you think it means: scuttlebutt is that it’s short for Deeply Scary Sorcerer.
He’s nearly bald, his chin is two sizes two small for his skull, and his domed scalp gleams like bone: with his wizened mannerisms—like a public school master from the 1930s, Mr. Chips redux—people tend to underestimate him on first acquaintance. It’s a mistake they only make once. Whether or not they survive.
“Ah, Robert.” He looks up from the Memex screen, his face stained pale blue by its illumination. “Please be seated.”
I sit down. The chair, a relic of the cold war, squeaks angrily. “I fucked up.”
“Hold it for a minute, please.” He peers at something on the screen again, twisting a couple of dials and adjusting a vernier scale. Then he lifts a hinged lid covering the front of the Memex and begins to type rapidly on a stenographer’s keyboard. Paper tape spools out and over into a slot behind the keyboard. He inspects it for a moment, then reaches over to a panel and pulls out two organ stops. There’s a bright flash and a click, and he closes the lid over the keyboard with a look of satisfaction. “Saved.”
(The Memex is an electromechanical hypertext machine, running on microfiche: it’s fiddly, slow, lacks storage capacity, and needs a lot of maintenance. I once asked him why he stuck with it; he grunted something about Van Eck radiation and changed the subject.)
“Now, Robert. What did you think of the elephant?”
“Never got to see it.” I shake my head. “I said I—”
“Oh dear.” Angleton looks mildly irritated: I shiver.
“That’s what I came to tell you; I’ve just finished filing an R60 and Iris told me to sign off sick for the week. I killed a bystander by accident. It’s a real fuck-up.”
“So you didn’t see the white elephant.”
I do a double take. “Boss? Hello? Major FATACC incident while carrying out the primary assignment! What’s so important about a museum piece?”
“Harrumph.” He reaches out and flicks a switch: the Memex screen goes dark. “I thought it was high past time you were briefed on the Squadron.”
“The Squadron? That would be 666 Squadron RAF, right? I looked them up on the web—they were deactivated in 1964, weren’t they?”
Angleton’s thin smile tells me exactly what he thinks of the world wide web.
“Not exactly. They were just redeployed in support of a higher mission.”
I remember the blue-glowing instrument panel lighting up the hangar from behind canvas screens, and shudder. “What kind of . . . ?”
“They’re part of the contingency planning for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, boy.” He looks momentarily annoyed, as if the impending end of the world as we know it is a minor inconvenience. “Bystanders,” he murmurs: “Whatever will they think of next?”
“The white elephant,” I prompt, but I’m too late.
“Never mind that now, boy, you can go back and look at it later.” He looks at me, concern and irritation wrinkling his face further, and this time he’s actually looking, studying me with those merciless washed-out eyes as if I’m a sample on a dissection tray: “Hmm. If Iris told you to take the rest of the week off, I suppose you ought to do as she says. A bystander, eh? What was a bystander doing there?”
“She was a volunteer at the museum—she was bringing us tea.”
Angleton’s eyes narrow. “Was she indeed?” He picks up a pen and a pad and scrawls a list of numbers on it. “Well, when you feel like getting back to work, you might want to go down to the stacks and retrieve these documents from the dead file store. I think you’ll find them very interesting.” He signs the note and slides it across the table at me. The document references are just catalog numbers identifying files by their shelf location, no actual codewords referring to named projects. Typical of Angleton, to be so elliptical about things. “And I’d like you to deputize for me on the BLOODY BARON committee.”
“Iris is putting me on light administrative duties,” I protest.
Angleton smiles humorlessly. “Then you’ll have something to d
o when you’re bored,” he says. “Be off with you!”
3.
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE DAYLIGHT
I EMERGE FROM THE STAFF ENTRANCE TO THE C&A ON THE high street, blinking like a groundhog caught in the headlights of an onrushing Hummer.
It is a Wednesday, just before the lunchtime rush, and the pavements are full of shoppers and people with nowhere better to go. A herd of buses rumble past, farting clouds of sulphurous biodiesel and lunging at cyclists. But I am not at work. Something is wrong with the world, something is broken: a wire has come loose in my soul.
I start to walk.
I don’t want to go home just yet: it’s sixty to seventy minutes of riding on two buses, but then I’ll have nothing to do but sit staring at the walls for the rest of the afternoon. If it was a normal summer’s day I could go for a walk on Wandsworth Common—it’s only about a mile or two from here—but the sky is overcast and gray, threatening rain later on. Or I could go into town. Maybe get the tube to Euston and visit the British Library. I’ve got a reader’s card, and there are some interesting manuscripts I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, relevant to the job . . . No, I can hear Iris ticking me off in the back of my head, telling me that’s not what I ought to be doing when I’m on medical leave.
In the end, I walk to the next bus stop just in time to see the tail end of the herd vanishing round the corner, and wait nearly ten minutes for the next bunch of buses to arrive, with only my iPod for company—that, and a couple of students, a pensioner pushing a shopping bag on wheels, and an Uncle Fester type in a dirty trench coat who is pointedly not making eye contact with anyone.
I sit on the top deck for forty minutes as it slowly migrates towards Victoria, then hop off and head for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet for lunch. It’s stowed out, as you can imagine, because I’ve hit peak lunch time; but it makes a welcome change from the dismal little pie shop round the corner from the New Annexe. I emerge into daylight with a full stomach and my sense of well-being marginally restored. It’s trying to rain, lonely drips spattering the pavement and evaporating before they can join up. I shuffle along with the tourists and foreign language students and shirking office workers, staring into shop windows and feeling faintly wistful, something nagging at the back of my mind.
The Fuller Memorandum l-4 Page 4