During the occupation, Teapot set his sixteen men to stand guard with bayonets fixed outside the great hall where the treasures and gifts of five hundred lamaseries are kept. It is a remarkable place, a museum of wonders unknown in all of Europe. There is a library with shelves devoted to manuscripts in a myriad of languages, and there are chests full of amber from the shores of the Northern Sea, carved walrus and ivory tusks, rings with sapphires and rubies from China and India, rough diamonds the size of your fingertip, bags of golden thread filled with pearls, and side-rooms filled with cases containing statues of the Living Buddha made from every precious material under the sun.
Now Teapot is among the most obedient of my officers, but in the course of restoring order to the city and chasing the remaining enemy rabble out into the wilderness it was some days before I could return with the Bogd Khan to inspect his treasures. In that time I am afraid to say that he disgraced himself. Teapot did not steal the Buddha’s treasures, else I would have hanged him as high as any other wretch; but he idly looked through the library, and I fear what he did may turn out for the worse in the long run.
There are, as you can imagine, scrolls and books unnumbered in there, and they include the most remarkable works of sorcery and prophecy imaginable. All the numerous punishments of hell that are reserved for souls who indulge in the sins of the flesh are documented and indeed illustrated in the finest, one might almost say pornographic, detail. It was to these works that Teapot allowed his salacious imagination to draw him.
It is not clear exactly when Teapot found the scroll, but two days after the fall of the palace his sergeant was dismayed to come upon him lying on the floor of the library, crying inarticulately and clutching a crumpled fragment of scripture in his chubby hands. According to the other witnesses, who I have questioned diligently, Teapot showed other signs of distress: bleeding from the eyes, moaning, and clutching his belly.
They put him to bed in the hospital supervised by Dr. Klingenberg, who was minded to euthanize Teapot to spare him from this misery, but wiser counsel prevailed and my cossacks continued to care for him until he began to recover the following day, babbling in tongues and occasionally ululating: “Ieyah! Ieyah!”
On the third day, just as I was on my way back to the palace, Teapot is said to have sat up in bed, whereupon he asked, “What year is it?” Upon being told it was 1920, he collapsed in a dead faint. And although he is now back at his duties, he is not the same. There is a cold intellect in him that was hitherto absent. Before, he was a loyal brute, but limited: he gave no thought to the morrow. Now he anticipates my orders with eerie efficiency, organizes the men under his command to meet any contingency, shows an unerring ability to sniff out spies—indeed, he has begun to unnerve me, the more so since I discovered he has other qualities. It is commonplace for war to degrade a good man to the level of a brute, but unique in my experience for it to elevate one such as Ensign Burdokovskii.
Consequently, I would like to ask a favor of you, dear mother.
Enclosed with this letter I send a copy of the Buddhist scripture that so turned Teapot’s mind. It is written in an archaic dialect of Barghu-Buryat. I have heard that Professor Sartorius of the Schule des Toten Sprachen in Berlin has some expertise in material of this nature, and I would deeply appreciate it if you could forward the document to him and commission a translation, at my expense! This is a matter that I am extremely reluctant to entrust to any of my political associates, for they scheme and plot incessantly, and I am sure there are many who believe that I dabble in the blackest sorcery; I would not like to place such incendiary ammunition in their hands. I implore you not to soil your precious eyes with the contents of this scroll, for it is illustrated with such vile and obscene diagrams that I would be tempted to burn it, were it not for the effect it seems to have on those who read it! But it is for that very reason that I urgently need to obtain the advice of a savant who might tell me what those who read the fragment become. And so, I commit it to your gentle hands.
Your loving son,
General Baron Ungern Von Sternberg
8.
CLUB ZERO
I GET HOME AN HOUR AND A HALF LATE, BONE-TIRED, BAMBOOZLED, and bothered. I haven’t had a good day at the office, all things considered: a confusing briefing on Russian OCCINT activities in Western Europe, an old acquaintance who doesn’t recognize me anymore, the discovery that the Fuller Memorandum is missing, and now Panin’s evident patronizing contempt for my lack of insight. I’ve got a feeling that all the pieces of the jigsaw are within my grasp, if only I could figure out where they lie—probably dragged under the sofa by an invisible cat, knowing my luck.
It’s after eight as I turn my key in the lock, pass my left hand over the ward, and slope into the front hall. The lights are on in the kitchen, and there’s a pleasant smell—Mo is roasting a chicken, I think. “Hello?” I call.
“Up here!” She’s upstairs and she doesn’t sound pissed off, which is a relief.
I dump my jacket and take the stairs two at a time. The bathroom door’s open and she’s stewing herself in the tub in an inordinate amount of green foam and some kind of mud mask, so that she looks a little like the creature from the black lagoon. “Did you get my text?” I ask.
“Yes. Who was the Addams Family reference about?”
I do a double take: “What—Oh shit.” I shake my head. “Never mind.” Obviously she can’t read my mind, otherwise there’d have been an Artist Rifles’ brick staking out the pub before I’d taken my first mouthful of beer. I’m losing my touch. “I’m screwing up,” I admit.
“You’re . . . ? Huh. Bet you I’ve had a more boring day.”
“Boring, maybe; unproductive, hardly.”
She snorts and blows a handful of bubbles my way. “I spent most of the morning and afternoon sitting on a wooden stool, watching a burned-out sixty-something expert mumble into a dictaphone. Then I had to run for a meeting. After that I looked in on the office but Mike wasn’t there, so I came home. Picked up a free-range bird at Waitrose; it’s in the oven now. I was hoping you might want to fix some side helpings?”
“I can do that.” I glance at the bath. “You going to be long?”
“Half an hour at least. I put the chicken in before I came up here; you want to look in on it in fifteen minutes or so.”
I’d rather spend my time here with her, but I can tell the difference between an order and a request: I sketch a salute. “By the way,” I say, trying to sound casual about it, “I’ve been stuck with Angleton’s work on BLOODY BARON, and I’m finding it a bit confusing. And nobody’s sent me the briefing papers on the other job yet, the one—you know. Last week.”
She’s silent for almost a minute. Then she sighs. “There’s a bottle of Bordeaux at the back of the cupboard under the plates and crockery. Open it and give it a while to breathe.”
“Okay. Um, sorry.” I back out of the bathroom, leaving her to try and rebuild the warm, scented bubble that I just burst.
I scrub and boil potatoes, then shove them in a roasting pan, check the chicken, chop some carrots, and have the vegetables just about ready when Mo comes downstairs in her bathrobe, hair in a towel. “Smells good,” she remarks, then looks skeptically at my potatoes. “Hmm.” She takes over; I get the plates out and pour two generous glasses of wine. It’s later than I expected and I’m really rather hungry.
Food and wine settle stomach and soul; neither of us is a very sophisticated cook (although Mo is much more experimentally minded than I am), but we can eat what we prepare for ourselves, which is a good start, and after half an hour we’ve methodically demolished half a small roast chicken and a pan of roast vegetables, not to mention most of a bottle of wine. Mo looks content as I shove the plates in the dishwasher and sort out the recyclable bits. “You wanted to know what Thursday was about,” she says, staring at what’s left in her wineglass.
“I keep running into people who expect me to know.” I go in search of another bottle to
open. “It’s not something I can ignore.”
“How much of CLUB ZERO are you familiar with?”
“I’m not.” I get the waiter’s friend out and go to work on a pinot noir.
“Oh.” She pauses. “I’m sorry, but—are you sure you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” I ask irritably as I scrape away the plastic seal on the bottle. “Are we in known unknowns territory, or unknown unknowns?”
“They’re known okay.” She shakes her head. “Fucking cultists.”
“Cul—” I do a double take. “That’s CLUB ZERO?”
She nods. “None other.”
Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.
Being predisposed to religion has its uses, but it’s a real Achilles’ heel if your civilization is under threat by vastly powerful alien horrors. We have a rich repertoire of primate behavior which includes the urge to suck up to the big bad alpha male, and a tendency to assume that any intelligence smarter or nastier than we are is the top of the pack hierarchy. Finally, we’ve got any number of dark religions out there. The followers of Kali or Mictecacihuatl or the various other faces of the lady of death. Certain splinter sects of millennialist Christianity who believe that the Revelation of St. John is black propaganda and that Satan will triumph. Strange heresies, by-blows of the Albigensians who trace their heritage back to secret cells who worshiped Ahriman in the palace basements of the Persian Empire. Other groups who are less familiar: syncretistic heresies spawned by bizarre collisions between seekers of hidden knowledge and followers of Tibetan demon princes. And, of course, bat-winged squid gods, although I find it hard to believe that anyone takes that seriously these days.
None of their specific beliefs matter. What matters is that if a cell or coven or parish or whatever get their hands on a genuine summoning ritual, the things at the other end of the occult courtesy phone aren’t fussy about what they’re called as long as the message is “chow time.”
I take a deep breath. “What variety of cult was it this time?”
“The rich American expat kind.” She takes a deep breath.
“American? But didn’t the Black Chamber—”
“They didn’t lift a finger.” Her voice rises. “Instead, the Dustbin got a reluctant tip-off from the FBI that a bunch of nutty Jeezmoids from the every-sperm-is-sacred crowd were planning on making a big splash at the UN Population Fund summit in Den Haag last week. It’s not terrorism in America this decade if they shoot doctors or firebomb family planning clinics, you know?”
I let her simmer for a minute while I pull the cork on the wine bottle and pour the last of the first bottle into her glass. “How did it get punted our way?”
“Chatter and crosstalk.” She drains her glass and shoves it towards me. “These aren’t your regular god-botherers, they’ve got form.” (A history of criminal activity, in other words.) “The Dustbin and the Donut are both keeping tabs on them. They tipped off the Dutch AIVD, which is good, but then they forgot to include us in the loop, which was anything but good. What finally pulled us in was when the AIVD Watch Team who were keeping an eye on the hundred kilograms of sodium chlorate and the primer cords they’d stockpiled noticed the church supplies catalog and the white goats. The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom—”
“The Free Church of the what?”
Mo takes a big mouthful of wine. “The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom. Officially they’re pre-millennial dispensationalists with a couple of extra twists, subtype: utterly barking and conflicted; oh hell. According to their party line Jesus was just there to set a good example, and we all have the ability to save ourselves. Who will be saved is predestined from the beginning of time, it’s their job to bring the Church militant to everybody on the planet by fire and the sword, and, er, it gets complicated real fast, in ever diminishing epicycles of crazy. I swear, the doctrinal differences between some of these schismatic churches are fractal . . . Anyway, the key insight you need to bear in mind is, they’re anti-birth control. Very anti-birth control, with overtones of accelerating the Second Coming by bringing more souls to Earth until Jesus can’t ignore their suffering anymore—is this ringing any bells yet?”
“You’re telling me they’re CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN groupies?”
Mo nods vigorously. “They’re mesmerized. What they believe doesn’t make sense in terms of traditional Christian theology, never mind real-world logic. That’s because the outer church is just a cover for something even weirder. The members we were monitoring were laboring under a really horrid glamour, level four or higher—I’m not sure.”
I shudder. I knew someone with a level three glamour about her once. Men would die for a chance to bed her if she crooked her little finger at them—often literally. The theological equivalent . . . I don’t want to think about it. “So. Amsterdam, then . . . ?” I prompt her.
“Four of them were already there. Another three flew in the week before; that’s why the full-dress incident watch was started. AIVD thought it was preparation for an abortion clinic bombing campaign at first. But then the pastor bought a couple of white goats and the penny dropped and they threw it at Franz and his friends, who asked us to chip in.”
“Goats—”
“Goats, sacrificial, summoning, for the purpose of. The Watch Team were so busy keeping an eye on the explosives stockpile that nobody noticed the metalworking tools and the crucifixes, or the fact that they’d rented a deconsecrated Lutheran chapel three months earlier and invited their bishop over for a flying visit. It was only last Tuesday that they put two and two together and realized what was really going on. That’s when they called me in.”
She looks bleak and alone, clutching her wineglass as if it’s the sole source of warmth in the world.
“The bomb was a decoy. Turns out there were two cells working, one of whom—outer church—didn’t know they were set up as a cover story. The other cell, the ones with the goat and the summoning grid in the crypt of the chapel, they were the real operators, initiates of the true faith. They were all set to open a gate to a, a—” She swallows. I sit down next to her and take her free hand in mine. “I hate those things,” she says plaintively.
“It wasn’t just goats, was it?” I probe. “The goats were the setup for something else.”
“The chapel was right next to a nursery school,” she says, and falls silent.
Ick is about all I can say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and squeeze her hand gently until she feels like continuing.
“We’d picked up a squad of UIM specialists and a police anti-terrorism group who prepared to seal off the area. Trouble is, it was mid-afternoon and the neighborhood was busy; the last thing you want to do is to run an anti-terrorism exercise next door to a nursery school when the parents are coming to pick their kids up. It’s a target-rich zone and it draws journalists like flies to a sewage farm. So we were going to hold off until evening. But then the OCCULUS command truck monitors lost the sound from the bugs, and I began to pick up probability disturbances in the vicinity of the chapel, and it looked too risky to hold off. The troops went in, and I followed them. It was unpleasant.”
“What
did they . . . ?”
“They’d built a summoning grid in the altar. And they’d set up a greater circuit, with a geodesic pointing straight at the . . . the nursery school over the road.” She dry swallows again. “They started with the goats as a warm-up exercise. But there was a homeless woman, and they’d used her as, as—” Mo gulps, then wipes her lips. “Intestines. Ropes and hanks and skeins of—a greater circuit made of human guts, still joined to the sacrifice.” She’s not swallowing: she’s trying not to throw up.
“Stop.” I try to let go of her hand. “You don’t need to go on.”
“I need to.” She clenches her fist around my fingers and stares at me. “They’d crucified her, you know? The microphones picked up their prayers earlier: I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me—they meant it literally. I don’t know why we didn’t hear the screams, I think they might have sedated her first. I hope they, they did that.” That’s a forlorn hope; pain is a power source in its own right. But I don’t remind her of this. She’s shaking now: “The gate was open, Bob. I had to go through.”
My Joan of Arc. I rescued Mo, once, years ago; it’s ironic, a real giggle, that she turns out to be stronger and tougher than I am. Would you dive through a steaming intestinal gate into a soul-sucking void, armed only with a violin flensed from the bones of screaming sacrifices? She did. And she kept a lid on it afterwards, a stiff upper lip, while I was shuddering and stressed over what was basically an industrial accident. It’s a good thing to put your problems in perspective from time to time, but right now I’d rather not, because I’m doing the comparison right now and I find I’m coming up so short I’m ashamed of myself.
The Fuller Memorandum l-4 Page 14