“Do you truly believe you can shoot one of the Hounds with impunity, mortal?”
I’ve got a bearing on Windbag now. Your typical B-Team idiot is either a religious fanatic who’s grown up listening to preacher-men ranting and foaming in seventeenth-century English, or they’re a wannabe who’s seen too many horror flicks. I’m betting on the second kind here. I take a step back—accidental contact with this particular species of doggie is about as safe as licking the third rail on the Underground—then quickly slip my left hand into my pocket and mutter the command word to ignite the Hand of Glory as I pull it out of my pocket.
Of course the HOG lights off promptly, but its little pinky is tangled in my pocket lining and comes free with a foul gust of scorched linen—something else to hold against the gloating ratfucker. I take a long step sideways, then another, holding the wrinkled hand at arm’s length out to one side. The Glock is a numbing drag on my opposite arm: nothing like as bad as a Browning, but I can’t keep this up forever.
A second voice chirps up from behind the thrashing Hound, about where I was standing five seconds ago: “Hey, where’d he go?”
(He sounds . . . dim. Let’s call him Minion #1.)
“Fuck!” That’s Windbag. He sounds pissed off. “We’re going to lose him! All-Highest will be displeased!”
“I’ve got the path.” A third voice, female and coldly controlled. Maybe she’s an A-Team player assigned to ride herd on the clown car. (She can be Minion #2 until proven competent.) “You walk the—”
No plan survives contact with the enemy—especially when the enemy is invisible, within earshot and taking notes—but even more importantly, no cultist survives physical contact with one of the Hounds. The doggie of doom flails one paw against the ground and its back arches as it goes into the seizure I’ve been expecting ever since I plugged it with a banishment round. Which is bad luck for Minion #1, who is in the path of one viciously barbed paw. He gives a brief gurgling scream, but is already dead by the time the sound reaches me: it’s just air venting from the corpse’s lungs and reverberating through its larynx on the way out. Every muscle in his body contracts simultaneously with a strange popping sound as his joints dislocate and ligaments tear, in a spasmodic breakdance that ends in a pile beside the Hound.
I don’t wait to see what they do next—I scramble up the dry soil embankment, moving diagonally between tree trunks.
“We’re going to lose him!” Minion #2 calls in a high, bell-ringing voice. “Fallback plan!” Okay, she’s promoted to Mistress. I think for a moment that she’s telling Windbag to withdraw, but then I hear the second truly spine-chilling noise of the evening, the unmistakable sound of someone racking the slide on a pump-action shotgun.
I throw myself flat against the side of the embankment and roll over on my back, still clutching the Hand of Glory and my pistol as the two robed figures on the path raise their weapons and pour fire past each other, sweeping up and down the bike path. They set up a reverberating roar that jars the teeth in my head: they’re not aiming, they’re simply spraying clouds of buckshot at waist level. I’m about two meters up the embankment above them, and twenty meters away. Holding my breath, I glance at the HOG in my left hand. The fingertips are burning steadily—I have perhaps three or four minutes of invisibility. Odds of two to one, shotguns against silenced pistol, at twenty meters? Not good. I could probably take them—probably, but I’d have to put the Hand of Glory down, and if I didn’t get them both with my first two shots I’d be giving the survivor a muzzle flash to aim for. With a shotgun, let’s not forget.
Fucking B-Team cultists. If this was the A-Team, they’d summon something exotic and deadly to set on my ass—something I’d have a chance of banishing. But the B-Team were at the back of the queue the day All-Highest was handing out death spells, so they just blaze away with shotguns.
Ten rounds later—it feels like having my head slammed in a doorway ten times in a row—they lower their guns. “He’s legged it,” says Windbag.
“Right. We’re leaving.” Mistress’s voice is so chilly you could rent it out as an air conditioner. “Philip is dead. This will not be received well by All-Highest. Let me do the talking, if you value your life.”
“But can’t we—” Windbag whines.
I don’t hear what he says next, though, because Mistress says something in a voice that distorts weirdly as she speaks: and then a hole in the air opens and closes, and they’re not there anymore. Neither is the Hound. It’s gone, taking the corpse of Minion #1 back to wherever it is that the Hounds come from. The glamour is gone, too: below me, the cycle path is restored—just another rustic suburban alleyway, lit by the streetlight glare from the nighttime clouds overhead.
I shudder uncontrollably for a minute. Then I carefully extinguish the fingers of the HOG, holster my pistol, stumble back down the embankment to the footpath, and dust myself off.
They weren’t after Mo: they were after me. They knew how to find me and they wanted to know about the Teapot. Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action, which means it’s time to go to work.
9.
NIGHT SHIFT
WALKING TO THE OFFICE ISN’T SOMETHING I’D NORMALLY DO, because it takes about three hours, but I am feeling inconveniently surveilled and I don’t like the idea of the MAGINOT BLUE STARS network being able to track me. So I follow the footpath for another half kilometer before reigniting the Hand of Glory and dashing back almost all the way I’ve come, then exiting onto a side street. I take two corners and jump a fence into somebody’s backyard before I extinguish the HOG again, then walk out casually with my shoulders back and my chin up.
A bus ride in an irrelevant direction takes me ten minutes farther away from the office—then it’s into a back alley and time to reignite the HOG for a brisk kilometer. Finally I snuff it out and catch a different bus that passes close enough to the New Annexe that I can walk from the stop.
I march up to the darkened C&A staff entrance and key my number, then swipe my pass card. The door clicks, and I step inside. It’s totally black, and in the gloom I can hear the restless shuffling of one of the night staff. I pull out my warrant card hastily, lest I be eaten by a grue: arguing with the night watchmen is singularly futile unless you do it with a chain saw or a baseball bat.
“Brrrrr—”
“Get me a torch,” I snap. The warrant card is all very well—it sheds a faint, nacreous glow—but the backlight invocation has unpleasant side effects if you crank up the lumens too high. (Why is it that all the movies make it look as if wizards find invoking light easy? Tenuous glows and balefire are all very well, but there’s a reason we use fluorescent tubes around here.)
“—rains?” he asks plaintively.
A torch flicks on and I see the wizened face of its holder. “Here, give me that.” I take the torch, being careful to hold the warrant card between me and the doorman. I think he might be Fred from Accounting, but if so, he’s definitely a bit the worse for wear these days; it’s several years since he died, and not everyone around here gets the deluxe Jeremy Bentham treatment. Mostly HR just arrange for one of us to stick them in a summoning grid and bind one of the eaters in the night to service (weak, minimally sentient efflorescences of alien will, that can animate a corpse and control it just about enough to push a broom, or scare the living daylights out of unwanted nighttime visitors). I gather it saves on funeral expenses. “Stay here and forget I came this way. That’s an order.”
I climb the stairs, leaving the residual human resource behind to eat any unwitting B-Team cultists who were stupid enough to tail me. It’s past midnight and they make regular inspection rounds, so I keep my card out and hope like hell the battery in this plastic piece of shit lasts until I make it to my office. I keep a proper torch there, a Maglite that’ll work properly when it’s time to go visit Angleton’s lair and turf those files from top to bottom. Luckily the plastic piece of shit holds out and I let myself in, flick on the light, shut the door, an
d flop down behind my desk with a sigh of relief.
“Took your time getting here, didn’t you, boy?”
In the time it takes me to peel myself off the ceiling and return my pistol to its holster, Angleton takes up residence in my visitor’s chair, folding his ungainly limbs around himself like a spindly black spider. The skeletal, humorless grin tells me I’m in trouble even before I open my mouth.
“I’ve waited here for three consecutive nights. What delayed you?”
I close my mouth. Then I open it and close it again a couple of times, just for practice. Finally, when I trust myself to speak, I say one word: “Cultists.”
“Three days, boy. Suppose you tell me what you’ve learned?”
“One moment.” My paranoia is growing. I take out my phone and peer at him through its camera. TRUESEER tells me that I am, indeed, looking at my boss, who is looking increasingly irritated. I make the shiny vanish. “Okay. From the top: the Fuller Memorandum is missing, the Russians have gotten all upset, cultists are throwing their toys out of the pram, and everyone wants to know about the Teapot. Oh, and someone in Research and Development says that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn’t going to wait a couple of years, but is due to kick off in a few weeks or months at the most. What am I missing?”
Angleton stares at me coldly. “You’re missing the spy, boy.”
“The”—I nearly swallow my tongue—“spy?”
“Yes: Helen Langhorn. Aged seventy-four, widow of Flight Lieutenant Adrian Langhorn, long-term resident of Cosford, working part-time at the museum as a volunteer. Met her husband while she was in the WRAAF back in 1963. Which is a pretty interesting occupation for her to have been in, considering that she was also a captain in the Russian Army and a GRU Illegal who was inserted into the UK in 1959, when she was barely out of her teens.”
I make an inarticulate gurgling noise. “But she—the hangar—she wasn’t—she can’t have—”
Angleton waits for me to wind down. “The many-angled ones are not the only enemy this country has ever faced, boy. Some of us remember.” (It’s okay for him to say that—I was about ten when the cold war ended!)
“Helen Langhorn’s primary assignment did not come to an end just because the Soviet Union collapsed. To outward appearances her utility had been in decline for many years, after her husband failed to achieve advancement, costing her access to people and bases; once she hit sixty with no long-term prospects they wrote her off. That is one of the risks one runs with long-term Illegals—their entire life may be marginalized by one or two unfortunate and unpredictable errors. There are probably fifty others like her in the UK—retired bank managers and failed politicians’ wives pruning their privet hedges and daydreaming of the revolution that failed them. Or perhaps they accept it gladly, happy to no longer be a pawn on the chessboard. But in any case, Helen’s career appears to have undergone a brief second flowering in the last few years.”
“But she”—I flap my jaws inarticulately—“she was halfway to dementia!”
“Was she?” Angleton raises a skeptical eyebrow. “She was on the front desk of a museum gallery barely two hundred meters from Hangar 12B, where Airframe 004 is being cannibalized for spare parts to keep the other three white elephants airworthy. You may think that no more than a coincidence, but I don’t.”
“You never told me what that stuff about the white elephants was about—”
“I expected you to find out for yourself, boy.” Then Angleton does something I absolutely never expected to see: he sighs unhappily.
“Boss?”
Angleton leans back in his chair. “Tell me about Chevaline,” he asks.
“Chevaline?” I frown. “Wasn’t that some sort of nuclear missile program from the sixties or seventies, something like that?”
“Chevaline.” He pauses. “Back in the 1960s, when Harold Wilson cut a deal with Richard Nixon to buy Polaris missiles for the Royal Navy, the tacit assumption was that a British nuclear deterrent need merely be sufficient to pound on Moscow until the rubble bounced. During the 1970s, the Soviets began to construct an anti-ballistic-missile shield around Moscow. It was crude by modern standards: anti-missile rockets with nuclear warheads—but it would have rendered the British Polaris force obsolete. So during the 1970s, a succession of Conservative and Labour governments pushed through a warhead upgrade scheme that replaced the original MRV warheads with far more sophisticated MIRV buses, equipped with decoys and able to engage two targets rather than one. The project was called Chevaline; it cost a billion pounds back in the day—when a billion pounds was real money—and they didn’t even tell the Cabinet.”
“A billion pounds? With no oversight?” I blink rapidly. We’re subject to spot audits on office stationery, all the way down to paper clips.
“Yes.” Angleton smiles sepulchrally. “We helped ensure security, so that it was relatively easy for them to spend an extra two hundred million pounds in 1977 to keep the Concorde production lines at Filton and Bristol open for long enough to produce four extra airframes for the RAF,” Angleton says blandly. “The Plumbers ensured that nobody remembered a thing afterwards.”
“RAF 666 Squadron fly Concordes?”
“Flew them,” Angleton corrects me. “The long-range occult reconnaissance model, not the nuclear-armed model the RAF originally asked for in 1968. You may not be aware of this, but Prototype 002 was built with attachment points for a bomb bay before the project was abandoned; Bomber Command wanted to replace V-force with a fleet of supersonic bombers that could carry Blue Steel nuclear stand-off bombs to Moscow, but the Navy won the toss. Instead, the RAF got the recon version, with supercargo space for the six demonologists and the optics bench to open the gate they needed to fly through.”
My jaw is beginning to ache from all the speechless opening-and-closing cycles. “You’re shitting me.”
Angleton shakes his head. “The Squadron was based in Filton and Heathrow, flying in British Airways livery—the aircraft movements were described as charter flights, and they wore the hull numbers of BA airframes that were currently undergoing maintenance. They flew one mission a week, departing west over the Atlantic. They refueled from a VC-10 tanker, then the supercargo would open a gate and they’d make a high-speed run across the dead plateau before reopening the gate home and landing at Filton for decontamination and exorcism. It’s all in CODICIL BLACK SKULL. Which you are cleared to read, incidentally.”
I shake myself and take a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that the RAF has a squadron of black Concordes which they currently keep in a hangar at RAF Cosford? Helen Langhorn was a former Soviet spy who, by a happy accident—for her employers—was in a position to poke around them? Which she did, with results that . . .” I shudder, remembering again: a purple flash, face shrinking and crumpling in on itself around the harsh lines of her skull. “And now the Thirteenth Directorate are sniffing round?”
“Very good! We’ll make a professional paranoid out of you one of these days.” Angleton nods, grudging approval.
“Concorde.” I do a double take. “But they’ve been retired, right?”
“That put a crimp on the cover story, certainly. These days they fly only at night, described as American B-1Bs if anyone asks. A big bomber with four engines and afterburners is a much flimsier cover, and the plane spotters and conspiracy theorists keep the Plumbers busy, but we cannot neglect the watch on the dead plateau. If the thing in the pyramid should stir—” He makes an abrupt cutting gesture with the edge of one hand.
“Dead plateau? Thing in the pyramid?” I’ve got no idea what he’s referring to, but it sounds ominous.
“You’ve been through a gate to elsewhere.” I remember a world in the grip of fimbulwinter, where the rivers of liquid air ran down through valleys of ice beneath a moon carved with the likeness of Hitler’s face. “There are other, more permanent, elsewheres. Some of them we must monitor continuously. That world . . . pray you never see it, boy, and pray that t
he sleeping god in the pyramid never awakens.”
I tilt my head from side to side, trying to spill the invisible goop that’s clogging up my mind. Thinking in here is difficult, as if the air, hazy with the congealed fumes of state secrets, is impeding my ability to reason—
“Boss. Why are you here? Everyone thinks you’ve gone missing, AWOL with no forwarding address.”
Angleton grins skeletally. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
My eyes are feeling hot and gritty from too much stress and too little sleep, but I manage to roll them anyway. “Big problem: you just tipped me off. Can you give me a reason not to out you to the BLOODY BARON team—other than ‘because I said so’?”
“Of course.” He looks increasingly, alarmingly, amused. What have I gotten myself into this time? “You’ll keep it to yourself because while the cat’s away the mice may play, and one of this particular bunch of mice appears to be a security leak, and I’m setting a trap for them. You’re the bait, by the way.”
“I’m the—”
“And to sex you up so they come after you, I’ve got a little job for you to do.”
“Right, that’s it, I’m through with—”
“Assuming you want to nail the scum responsible for the CLUB ZERO incident in Amsterdam.”
“—fucking cultists—really?”
“Yes, Bob.” He has the good grace not to look too smug. “Now shut up and listen, there’s a good boy.”
He deposits a slim memo on my desk, then places a small plastic baggie on top of it. I squint at it: it’s empty except for a paper clip.
“Here’s what I want you to do . . .”
CLASSIFIED: TEAPOT BARON TYBURN
FROM: Fuller, Laundry
TO: 17F, Naval Intelligence Division
Dear Ian,
Hope all’s well (and my best regards to your mother, long may she keep her nose out of operational matters).
You enquired about Teapot.
Subsequent to the death of Burdokovskii in 1921, Q Division determined that the preta referenced in the Sternberg Fragment had returned to the six paths, and if it could be recalled and bound into a suitable host it might be compelled to the service of the state. Given the magnitude of the powers possessed by this particular entity, this was considered a desirable objective; however, its reincarnation required that we provide the hungry ghost with a new host. Obviously, this presented them with a headache; so some bright spark finally came up with the idea of asking the Home Office. A request was accordingly submitted in 1923.
The Fuller Memorandum l-4 Page 16