Civil war memorabilia . . . ? A nasty thought strikes me, but Vikram looks as if he’s about to continue. “What’s special about Mudd?” I ask.
Choudhury looks irritated. “He was a mathematics professor and an occultist,” he says, “and he knew F.” The legendary F—the Laundry’s first Director of Intelligence, reporting to Sir Charles Hambro at 64 Baker Street—headquarters of the Special Operations Executive. Whoops. He cocks his head to one side: “If you don’t mind . . . ?”
I shake my head. “Sorry. I’m new to this.” Touchy, isn’t he? “Please continue.”
“Certainly. It looks as if the Thirteenth Directorate are taking an unusual interest in the owners of memorabilia associated with the late Baron Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, conqueror of Mongolia, Buddhist mystic, and White Russian leader. In particular, they seem to be trying to trace an item or items that Agent S76 retrieved from Reval in Estonia on behalf of our old friend F.” Choudhury looks smugly self-satisfied, as if this diversion into what is effectively arcane gibberish to me is supposed to be enlightening. “Any questions?” he asks.
For once I keep my gob shut, waiting to see if anyone else is feeling as out-of-the-loop as I am. I don’t have to wait long. Shona bulls ahead, bless her: “Yeah, you bet I’ve got questions. Who is this Baron Roman Von Stauffenberg or whoever? When was he—did he die recently?”
“Ungern Sternberg died in September 1921, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad after Trotsky’s soldiers captured him.” Choudhury taps his folio again, looking severe: “He was a very bad man, you know! He had a habit of burning paperwork. And he had a man nicknamed Teapot who followed him around and strangled people the Baron was displeased with. I suppose we could all do with that, ha-ha.” He doesn’t notice—or doesn’t care about—Iris’s fish-eyed glare. “But, aha, yes, he was one of those Russian occultists. He converted to Buddhism—Mongolian Buddhism, of a rather bloody sect—but stayed in touch with members of a certain Theosophical splinter group he had fallen in with when he was posted to St. Petersburg. Obviously they didn’t stay there after the revolution, but Ungern Sternberg would have known of his fellows in General Denikin’s staff, and possibly known of F, due to his occult connections. And the, ah, anti-Semitism.”
He looks pained. All intelligence agencies have skeletons in their closets: ours is our first Director of Intelligence, whose fascist sympathies were famous, and only barely outweighed by his patriotism.
“What can that possibly have to do with current affairs?” Shona’s evident bafflement mirrors my own. “What are they looking for?”
“That’s an interesting question,” says Choudhury, looking perturbed. He glances at me, his expression unreadable. “Mr. Howard might be able to tell us—”
“Um. What?”
My confusion must be as obvious as Shona’s, because Iris chips in: “Bob has only just come in on the case—Dr. Angleton didn’t see fit to brief him earlier.”
“Oh my goodness.” Choudhury looks as if he’s swallowed a toad. Live. “But in that case, we really must talk to the doctor—”
“You can’t.” Iris shakes her head, then looks at me again. “Bob, we—the committee—asked Angleton to investigate the link between Ungern Sternberg, F, and the current spike in KGB activity.” She looks back at Choudhury. “Unfortunately, he was last seen on Wednesday evening. He’s now officially AWOL and a search is under way. This happened the same night as Agent CANDID closed out CLUB ZERO. The next morning, CANDID and Mr. Howard were assaulted by a class three manifestation, and I don’t believe it’s any kind of coincidence that Agent Kurchatov was seen visiting the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens that morning—and left on an early evening flight back to Moscow.
“Let me be straightforward: all the signs suggest that the Thirteenth Directorate are suddenly playing very dangerous games on our turf. If the cultists who CLUB ZERO shut down turn out to be a front for the Thirteenth Directorate, then we have to assume that CLUB ZERO is connected with BLOODY BARON—and that turns it from a low-key adversarial tactical analysis into a much higher priority for us. They’re not usually reckless, and they’re not pushing the old ideological agenda anymore—they wouldn’t be acting this openly for short-term advantage—so we need to find out what they’re doing and put a stop to it, before anyone else gets hurt. Yes, Bob? What is it?”
I put my hand down. “This might sound stupid,” I hear myself saying, “but has anyone thought about, you know, asking them?”
I’M NOT BIG ON HISTORY.
When I was at school, I dropped the topic as soon as I could, right after I took my GCSEs. It seemed like it was all about one damn king after another, or one war after another, or a bunch of social history stuff about what it was like to live as an eighteenth-century weaver whose son had run off with a spinster called Jenny, or a sixteenth-century religious bigot with a weird name and a witch-burning fetish. Tedious shite, in other words, of zero relevance to modern life—especially if you were planning on studying and working in a field that was more or less invented out of whole cloth in 1933.
The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you.
History, it turns out, is all around us. Service House—where I used to have my cubicle—is where the Laundry moved in 1953. Before that, it used to belong to the Foreign Office. Before that, we worked out of an attic above a Chinese laundry in Soho, hence the name. Before that . . .
There was no Laundry, officially.
The Laundry was a wartime work of expedience, magicked into existence by a five-line memo headlined ACTION THIS DAY and signed Winston Churchill. It was directed at a variety of people, including a retired major general and sometime MI6 informer, whose dubious status was probably the deciding factor in keeping his ass out of an internment camp along with the rest of the Nazi-sympathizing Directorate of the British Union of Fascists—that, and his shadowy connections to occultists and mathematicians, his undoubted genius as a tactician and theorist of the arts of war, and the nuanced reports of his political officer, who figured his patriotism had a higher operator precedence than his politics. That man was F: Major-General J. F. C. “Boney” Fuller. He’s been in his grave for nearly half a century, and would doubtless be spinning in it fast enough to qualify for carbon credits as an environmentally friendly power source if he could see us today in all our multi-ethnic anti-discriminatory splendor.
But who cares?
That is, indeed, the big-ticket question.
Before the Laundry, things were a bit confused. You can do magic by hand, without computers, but magic performed by ritual without finite state automata in the loop—calculating machines, in other words—tends to be haphazard, unreliable, uncontrollable, prone to undesirable side effects, and difficult to repeat. It also tends to fuck with causality, the logical sequence of events, in a most alarming way.
We’ve unintentionally rewritten our history over the centuries, would-be sorcerers unwinding chaos and pinning down events with the dead hand of consistency—always tending towards a more stable ground state because chaos is unstable; entropy is magic’s great enemy. When the ancients wrote of gods and demons, they might well have been recording their real-life experiences—or they may have drunk too much mushroom tea: we have no way of knowing.
Let’s just say that you can’t always trust the historical record and move swiftly on.
On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scholars of night systematized and studied the occult with all the zeal Victorian taxonomists could bring to bear. There was a lot of rubbish written; Helena Blavatsky, bless her little cotton socks, muddied the waters in an immensely useful way, as did Annie Besant, and Krishnamurti, and a host of others.
And then there were those who came too damned close to the truth: if H. P. Lovecraft hadn’t died of intestinal cancer i
n 1937 something would have had to have been done about him, if you’ll pardon my subjunctive. (And it would have been messy, very messy—if old HPL was around today he’d be the kind of blogging and email junkie who’s in everybody’s RSS feed like some kind of giant mutant gossip squid.)
Then there were those who were sitting on top of the truth, if they’d had but the wits to see it—Dennis Wheatley, for example, worked down the hall in Deception Planning at SOE and regularly did lunch with a couple of staff officers who worked with Alan Turing—the man himself, not the anonymous code-named genius currently doing whatever it is they do in the secure wing at the Funny Farm. Luckily Wheatley wouldn’t have known a real paranormal excursion if it bit him on the arse. (In fact, looking back to the dusty manila files, I’m not entirely sure that Dennis Wheatley’s publisher wasn’t on the Deception Planning payroll after the war, if you follow my drift.)
But I digress.
It was to our great advantage during the cold war that the commies were always terrible at dealing with the supernatural.
For starters, having an ideology that explicitly denies the existence of an invisible sky daddy is a bit of a handicap when it comes to assimilating the idea of nightmarish immortal aliens from elsewhere in the multiverse, given that the NIAs in question have historically been identified as gods (subtype: elder). For seconds, blame Trofim Lysenko for corrupting their science faculty’s ability to cope with new findings that contradicted received political doctrine. For thirds, blame the Politburo, which, in the 1950s, looked at the embryonic IT industry, thought “tools of capitalist profit-mongers,” and denounced computer science as un-Communist.
Proximate results: they got into orbit using hand calculators, but completely dropped the ball on anything that required complexity theory, automated theorem proving, or sacrificial goats.
But that was then, and this is now, and we’re not dealing with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, we’re dickering with the Russian Federation. (When we’re not trying to save ourselves from the end of the world, that is.)
The Russians are no longer dragged backwards by the invisible hand of Lenin. Their populace have taken with gusto to god-bothering and hacking, their official government ideology is “hail to the chief,” and Moscow is the number one place on the planet to go if you want to rent a botnet.
There’s a pragmatic and pugnacious attitude to their overseas operations these days. Their ruling network, the siloviki, aren’t playing the Great Game for ideological reasons anymore, even though they came up through the KGB prior to the years of chaos: they’re out to make Russia great again, and grab a tidy bank balance in the process, and they’re playing hardball because they’re pissed off at the way they were shoved off the board during the 1990s—consigned to the dustbin of history, asset-stripped by oligarchs and bamboozled by foreign bankers.
And so, to the present. The whole of Western Europe—and a bunch of far-flung outposts beyond—are currently crawling with KGB foot soldiers. No longer the stolid gray-suited trustees of Soviet-era spy mythology, they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they have two things in common: snow on their boots and blood in their eyes. And if they’re looking for something connected with our founder, and deploying supernatural weapons on our territory—
We need to know why.
6.
RED ORCHESTRA
LET US TEMPORARILY LOOK ASIDE FROM YR. HMBL. CRSPNDNT’S work diary to contemplate a very different matter: a vignette of street life in central London. I am not, myself, a witness: so this is, to some extent, a work of imaginative reconstruction.
Visualize the scene: a side street not far from Piccadilly Circus in London, an outrageously busy shopping district crammed on both sides with fashion chains and department stores. Even the alleys are lined with bistros and boutiques, tidied up to appeal to the passing trade. Pedestrians throng the pavements and overflow into the street, but vehicle traffic is light—thanks to the congestion charge—and slow—thanks to the speed bumps.
Here comes a red-haired woman, smartly dressed in a black skirt, houndstooth-check jacket, medium heels. She’s holding a violin case in one hand, her face set in an expression of patient irritation beneath her makeup: a musician heading to a recital, perhaps. She looks slightly uncomfortable, out-of-sorts as she weaves between a pair of braying office workers, yummy mummies pushing baby buggies the size of lunar rovers, a skate punk in dreads, and a beggar woman in hijab. She cuts across the pavement on Glasshouse Street, crosses the road between an overheating BMW X5 and a black cab, and turns into Shaftesbury.
Somewhere in the teeming alleys behind Charing Cross Road there is a narrow-fronted music shop, its window display empty but for a rack of yellowing scores and a collection of lightly tarnished brass instruments. The woman pauses in front of the glass, apparently examining the sheet music. In fact, she’s using the window as a mirror, checking the street behind her before she places one hand on the doorknob and pushes. Her close-trimmed nails are smoothly sheathed in enamel the color of overripe grapes: there are calluses on the tips of her fingers.
A bell jingles somewhere out of sight as she enters the shop.
“Good afternoon?”
One side of the shop is occupied by a counter, glass bound in old oak, running back towards a bead-curtained alcove at the rear of the premises. A cadaverous and prematurely aged fellow with watery eyes, dressed as conservatively as an undertaker, shuffles between the hanging strings of beads and blinks at her disapprovingly.
“Mr. Dower? George Dower?” The woman smiles at him tightly, her lips pursed to conceal her teeth.
“I have that honor, yes.” He looks at her as if he wishes she’d go away. “Do you have an appointment?”
“As a matter of fact”—the woman slides a hand into her black leather handbag and produces a wallet, which falls open to display a card—“I do. Cassie May, from Sotheby’s. I called yesterday?” The card glistens with a strange iridescent sheen in the dim artificial light.
“Oh yes!” His expression brightens considerably. “Yes indeed! A restoration project, I am to understand . . . ?”
“Possibly.” The woman swings her violin case up above the glass counter then gently lowers it. “Our client has asked us to obtain a preliminary valuation, and also to inquire about the cost of certain necessary restoration work for an instrument of similar manufacture that is currently in storage in a degraded condition—it’s too fragile to move.” She reaches into her handbag again and when she takes her hand out, she’s holding an envelope. “Before examining the instrument, I would like you to sign this non-disclosure agreement.” She removes a thin document from the envelope.
Mr. Dower is surprised. “But it’s just a violin! Even if it’s a rarity—” He does a double take. “Isn’t it?”
The woman shakes her head silently, then hands him the papers.
Mr. Dower scans the first page briefly then glances up at her. “This isn’t from Sotheby’s—”
“If anybody asks you who I am and why I’m here, you will tell them I’m Cassie May, from Sotheby’s auction house, inquiring about a valuation.” She doesn’t smile. “You will now read the document and sign it.”
Almost as if he can’t help himself, Mr. Dower’s eyes return to the document. He scans it rapidly, mumbling under his breath as he turns the three pages. Wordlessly, he produces a pen from his inside jacket pocket.
“Not like that.” The woman offers him a disposable sterile needle: “First, you must draw blood. Then sign using this pen.” She waits patiently while he presses a digit against the needle, winces, and rubs the nib of the pen across the ball of his thumb. He makes no complaint about the unusual request, and doesn’t seem to notice the way she produces a small sharps container for the office supplies and carefully folds the document back into its envelope. “Good. By the authority vested in me I bind you to silence, under pain of the penalties specified in this document. Do you understand?”
Mr. Dower star
es at the violin case as if stunned. “Yes,” he mutters.
The woman who calls herself Cassie May unclips the lid of the violin case and lays it open before him.
Mr. Dower stares into the case for ten long seconds, barely breathing. Then he shudders. “Excuse me,” he says, hastily covering his mouth. He turns and stumbles through the bead curtain. A few seconds later she hears the sound of retching.
The woman waits patiently until Mr. Dower reappears, looking pale. “You can shut that,” he tells her.
“If you want.” She shrugs. “I take it you’ve seen one before.”
“Yes.” He shudders again, his gaze unfocused. He seems to be staring down inner demons. “What do I have to do to get you to take it away?”
“You give me a written evaluation.” She has another piece of paper, this one containing a short list of bullet points. “As I said, a preliminary estimate of the cost of repairing such a . . . relic. A half-gram sample excised from the corpse of another identical instrument. All necessary materials to be provided by the customer. If you can assess the nature of the bindings that hold it together, my employers would like to be able to replicate them.”
He stares at her. “Who are you from? Who sent you here?”
“I’m from the government department responsible for keeping instruments like this out of your shop. Unfortunately there is a time for business as usual, and then . . . well. Can you do it?”
Mr. Dower stares at the wall behind her. “If I must.”
“Good. If you attach your invoice to the report I will see that it is processed promptly.”
“When do you need the report?” he asks, shaking himself as if awakening from a dream.
“Right now.” She walks over to the door and flips the sign to CLOSED.
The Fuller Memorandum l-4 Page 10