“Paper clips?”
“Yes, I want all the paper clips and staples in that desk.” Her cheek quirks. “Mr. Dower was the type to fasten a report together before folding it and putting it in an envelope. And where there’s a link, there’s a chain of evidence.”
THE AUDIT BOARD CHEWS ME UP AND SPITS ME OUT IN LESS than an hour. Light as thistledown and dry as a dead man’s tongue I walk through the door, past the seated witnesses—the blue-suiters are collecting Choudhury now, ushering him into the Presence—and drift on stumbling feet towards my office. Except I don’t get very far: instead I bump up against a blue translucent bubble that seems to have swallowed the corridor, and everything in it, just before Iris’s office door. The bubble is warm and rubbery and I have a feeling that it would be a very bad idea indeed to try and bull my way through it, so I turn round and go back the other way, towards the coffee station.
I’m just scooping brown powder into a filter cone (the jug was empty right when I most needed it, as usual) when Iris clears her throat behind me.
“I’ve been Audited,” I say, in answer to her silent question. “I don’t think it went badly, but I gather I’m not allowed back in my office just yet.”
“No one is,” she says, surprisingly calmly. “Are you making a fresh pot?”
“Sure.” I slide the basket back into the coffee maker and hit the brew button. Iris watches me silently.
“Um, as a matter of fact, you won’t be going back to work for a bit,” she says.
“I—what?” The coffee machine clears its throat behind me as I stare at her.
“The civilian FATACC incident when you were out at Cosford has been upgraded.” Her expression is apologetic. “Sorry doesn’t begin to cut it, I know, but the Incident Committee has escalated it to Internal Affairs and they actioned me to notify you that you’re being suspended on full pay pending a full hearing.”
“They’re what?” I hear my voice rise uncontrollably, cracked. But what about Angleton’s plan? “But it’s not a FATACC anymore—”
“Bob! Bob? Calm down. This isn’t the end of the world. I’m sure the hearing will exonerate you; they don’t want you in the office until it’s over. It’s just a routine precaution—Bob?”
She’s talking to my back—I’m halfway down the corridor by the time she says my name, then round the bend and halfway down the twist that takes me to the stairwell to Angleton’s office. Because (fuck Helen Langhorn and her KGB sleeper medals, part of me is swearing furiously) I know damn well that I’m going to be exonerated, because the victim wasn’t a victim: she was a hostile agent who poked her nose into an off-limits area at the wrong time. So the question is: Why now? And there’s only one species of answer that fits—
I take the stairs two at a time, thudding down them hard enough to raise dust from the elderly carpet, bouncing off the bannister rail and caroming up against the door. I raise my phone and squint through its magic-mirror eye, seeing that the wards are merely the usual ones, and then I twist the doorknob and push.
“Boss?” I glance around the empty room. The Memex sits in its corner, hulking like a sleeping baby elephant; the filing cabinets are all neatly shut and sealed. “Boss?”
He’s not here. My spine crawls. Need to leave him a message. I head for the Memex and slide into the operator’s seat.
WRITE CLEARANCE.
I foot-type TEAPOT and wait for the soul-mangling symbol to disappear.
WRITE.
The menu prompt is empty. MESSAGE, I type. The prompt changes, and I keep going.
BOSS, THEY TOOK THE BAIT. PROBLEM: IA ARE SUSPENDING ME OVER COSFORD. AUDITORS MORE INTERESTED IN PAPER CLIPS. MY MOBILE NUMBER IS: . . .
Angleton isn’t a total technophobe. As long as he has my phone number he can get in touch. But now I’ve got another problem: I’m not supposed to be here. So I switch off the Memex carefully and stand up, and I’m just on the point of tiptoeing out of the room when two blue-suiters appear out of nowhere and grab my wrists.
“Careful now, sir. We wouldn’t want to make a fuss, would we?”
I look past his shoulder at Iris. She looks concerned. “Bob, what are you doing? Didn’t I tell you you were being suspended?”
I pant for breath. My heart’s hammering and my palms are slippery. “I was hoping—Angleton—”
She shakes her head sympathetically, then tuts to herself. “I think you’re overwrought. He’s been having a bad time lately,” she explains to the blue-suiters. “You need to go home and relax badly, don’t you, Bob?”
I can take a hint. I nod.
Blue-suit #2 clears his throat apologetically. “If he’s not cleared for this room, ma’am—” he begins.
“No, that’s all right,” Iris says, casting me a quelling look. “He’s—he was—personal secretary to DSS Angleton. He’s cleared for this room, and he’s not required to be off the premises until noon, and he obviously hasn’t touched anything”—I blink at that, but keep my mouth shut—“so you may feel free to report it, but he hasn’t actually violated the security articles. Yet.” She taps her wristwatch. “Not for another nine minutes. So I suggest you might want to take a deep breath and let these gentlemen escort you to the front door, Bob?”
She’s right. I really don’t want to still be in the building when my permission is suspended—the consequences would be drastic and painful, I imagine. “I’ll go quietly,” I hear myself saying. “If you’d like to lead the way . . .”
AT TWELVE THIRTY EXACTLY I FIND MYSELF STANDING ALONE in the middle of a concrete emptiness, the blurred ghosts of shoppers darting around me like shadows beneath a pitiless sun. I can’t remember how I came to this place. My hands are shaking and I can’t see the future. All I can see is gray. The sun is beating down but I’m cold inside. I keep seeing a purple flash, the old woman’s face rotting and flaking and shrinking around her skull before me; the thing on the bike path, growling deep in its throat.
(They took my pistol. “Don’t want you to go carrying that around when you’re all depressed, sir,” the blue-suiter told me.) I’d phone Mo and ask her to pick up another ward if I wasn’t feeling so frustrated and ineffectual.
Everything’s fallen apart at the very worst time, and it’s all my fault.
Item: There is a security breach. The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom—hereafter and forevermore to be known as the Goatfuckers, because that’s the least of what they get up to and I don’t want to think about them eating the blonde teacher’s face—have got an informer inside the Laundry.
I walk past a bus stop and an overflowing litter bin, the ashtray on its lid smoking and fulminating. There’s a disgusting stench of cheap tobacco and smoldering filter wadding. A convoy of buses rumbles past slowly, like a troupe of implausibly red elephants walking trunk-to-tail.
Item: They followed Mo home and they’re following me, and unless I’m very much mistaken they want the key that binds the Eater of Souls, which is probably one of our most powerful weapons. (Disguised as a public school master indeed!)
There’s a rundown concrete suburban shopping mall here, a brutalist plaza surrounded by walkways overlooking cheap supermarkets, an off-license, and a shuttered chemist’s. Abandoned disposable carrier bags clog the gutters. I walk beneath a bridge between two piers, and up an arcade walled by the display windows of empty shop units, as grimy as my sense of self-worth.
Item: The Goatfuckers aren’t the only people who are into the Laundry; Panin and the Thirteenth Directorate clearly know a lot more than I do about the CODICIL BLACK SKULL flights, Triple-six Squadron, and the Eater of Souls (who keeps cropping up in this mess like a bad penny). And anything that worries the KGB ought to worry the hell out of me, too.
I come out of the arcade in a wide alley lined with loading bays, rusting metal shutters drawn down across concrete slabs. Overflowing dumpsters redolent with the sweet fetor of dead rats lean between scraped and battered steel bollards, huddling together like school kids sharing a fag
behind the bike shed. The sky is clouding over, the merciless sun shrouded by dirty clouds of doubtful provenance. I keep walking.
Item: The Auditors wanted to know about Mo, and about paper clips. I know about paper clips and why they’re a security risk. (The laws of contagion and sympathy are fundamental to all systems of magic: quantum entanglement and spooky action-at-a-distance for the witch doctor set. More prosaically, if you’ve got a paper clip from the same box as a sibling that’s clipped to a top secret file . . . you figure it out. Okay?) But why did they want to know about Mo? What was the document she wanted me to retrieve? Am I missing something? What if it’s not all about me, or Angleton? The business in Saint Martin a few years ago should have been a wake-up call. Just because I’m under investigation, it doesn’t mean she—
—The hell I’m under investigation. No. I’m under suspicion. But suspicion of what?
My feet carry me past the end of the delivery alley and across a road where a cast-iron railway bridge shadows the terraced houses, their fronts smeared with smuts from the diesel locomotives that rumble overhead, freighting coal to the power stations that keep the lights burning and the hard drives turning. There is a cycle path here, and my feet seem to know which way they’re going. I turn left and find myself on an incline, ascending a tree-flanked slope. The faint tinkle of a bell prompts me to stand aside as an urban cyclist in luminous lycra zips past, coasting in the opposite direction.
Item: Angleton wants to use me as a tethered goat, but I’m not much use to him if I’m not in the right place when the Goatfuckers come calling. Damn, I hope he gets my message via the Memex. Where are we leaking? Is it via the BLOODY BARON committee? That seems to be the logical place, but . . .
A chill creeps over me and I glance up at a turbid cloudscape that wasn’t there five minutes ago, swirling masses of dirty cumulonimbus crammed with a promise of rain to come. Uh-oh. Here’s me, out and about in a lightweight summer jacket. I really ought to head for home. I keep walking, because it seems like the thing to do, although the shadows are lengthening among the dark green trees to either side. The cycle path is empty; I ought to start looking for an exit from it that’ll take me back down to street level and a bus stop or tube station. I glance behind me, but I can’t see the ramp I came up anymore.
Item: Doctor Mike’s research finding about the early onset of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Let’s hypothesize that the Goatfuckers heard about it by way of our security breach. We know the Goatfuckers want CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to come about—they’re fans of the old, dead nightmares that will stalk the planet once more. (They worship the things. How twisted is that?) Ford’s new finding suggests that the onset conditions for tearing a hole in the structure of reality are a bit more flexible than we previously thought. Which suggests that there are things the Goatfuckers can do to accelerate the onset of apocalypse, the stars coming right as the pulp writer put it. They’re showing an interest in the Eater of Souls. Why? Do they think that if they get their hands on the Fuller Memorandum they can control him, make him do something unspeakable that will shiver the stars in their tracks and split the sky apart like—
—I look up. “Oh fuck.” Then I shut my mouth and save my breath for more important activities. Like, for example, running away.
While I have been wandering aimlessly, locked in my head, my feet have guided me onto a dismal path. There are no cyclists or pedestrians in sight, just an endless dark strip of tarmac that curves out of sight ahead and behind me, surrounded by impenetrable walls of spiny evergreen shrubs that lean inwards above my head. I can’t see through the hedge, but there are pallid mushroom-like structures bursting from the soil around their roots. The cloudscape overhead is turbulent and dappled, side-lit by sunlight slanting under its floor—even though there are hours yet to go until sunset—and the ever-shifting whirlpools and knots of darkness roll and dance, lit from within by the snapshots of cosmic paparazzi.
I have no idea how I got here and I’m not amused with myself for succumbing to what was, at a guess, a very low-key glamour, but the urge to get out and find a safe refuge is overwhelming. Every instinct is screaming that I’m in immediate danger. And so I begin to jog, just as the U-boat klaxon starts to honk urgently from my breast pocket.
“Bob?” It’s Mo.
“I’m kind of busy right now,” I pant. “What’s up?”
“The memo I was after, are you sure it wasn’t in?”
Huh? “I’m dead sure. Listen, what was it about?”
“That external appraisal of my violin, I told you about that, remember?”
“Oh, that—”
“The examiner was murdered! About thirty-six hours ago. Bob, if they think you’ve got the violin report—”
“Listen, let me give you an update. I’ve been suspended on pay. I need you to pick up a ward for me, as soon as you can. I’m heading home now, but I’m in a spot of bother and they took my pistol. Angleton isn’t AWOL: Can you find him and tell him he was right, the Goatfuckers are after the bait and I need backup right now—”
The NecronomiPod beeps at me three times and drops the call.
“Fuck.” I thumb-tap the software ward back to life, then shove the JesusPhone back in my pocket and keep jogging, breathing heavily now. There’s a breeze in my face, shoving me back and slowing me down, and the surface of the footpath feels greasy and turgid, almost sticky. The sense of wrongness is overwhelming. I have a sense of déjà vu, harking back to my midnight run, although that path was miles away and didn’t look anything like . . .
Oh. Am I on a siding? I ask myself, as the headwind builds and the shadows deepen. I hear distant thunder and the first heavy slap of rain-drops on the path ahead: Did the Necropolitan line have branches that were edited out of the public record decades ago, by any chance?
The hoarse scream of a ghostly steam whistle echoes in my ears. It’s behind me. And it’s gaining ground.
It’s funny how you lose track of a situation while it spins out of control: in the space of about fifteen minutes I’ve let myself be led by the nose—or rather, the feet—from a busy suburban high street in London, right into an occult trap. There are places where the walls of reality are thin; the service corridors of hotels, subway footpaths at night, hedge-mazes and cycle paths. You can get lost in such places, led astray by a lure and a snare and a subliminal suggestion. These routes blend into one another. Of all the myriad ways that link the human realm to the other places, these are the ones we know very little about—because those of us who stumble into them seldom return with their minds intact.
I can feel my heart hammering as I run. The hedges to either side brandish spikes edged with a nacreous rind of blight. There are pale white shapes embedded in the wall of leaves, the flensed bones of intruders trapped in the interstices of the vegetative barrier. Overhead, the clouds are black as smoke from the funnel of a racing steam locomotive, boiling and raging at the ground. I don’t dare look back, even though I’m sure I’m being herded towards an ambush: the phone in my pocket is buzzing and vibrating in urgent Morse, signaling the presence of hostile intent.
I need to get off the path. The trouble is, there’s nowhere to go—
Hang on, I think. Am I seeing true?
There is this about the interstitial paths: it takes a fair bit of power to open a gate, and I didn’t notice any pentacles and altars draped in eviscerated goats during my walk through the decaying shopping center. On the other hand, it takes relatively little power to fake up a glamour to provide the illusion of a dark path. Wheezing, I reach for my phone, thumb it on, and slow my stride just enough that I can see the display. Bloody Runes, ward detector, turn the camera on the footpath—
A silver thread, disappearing around the bend ahead of me. I pan sideways, and the camera blurs then clears, showing me ordinary English nettles and a thinly spaced row of trees pruned well back from the path. It’s bright, too, the ground dappled with summer daylight filtered through the branches overhead. Gotcha. I jink
sideways, towards the menacing hedgerow on my right, slowing, eyes focused on the face of my phone as the shadows of the thorny wall loom over me—
And I crash through a stand of waist-high nettles and narrowly miss a young beech tree as the hedge and the thunderstorm sky vanish like the illusion they are.
“Ow!” I swear under my breath, the hot-bright pinprick sting of nettles rising on the back of my phone hand. I examine the side of the cutting the path runs through. Yes, it’s familiar. I’ve been here before, or somewhere very like it. Except for the lack of pedestrians walking the dog, or cyclists en route from one side of town to the other, it could be a normal bike track. But this one’s been warded off; anyone starting down it who isn’t wanted is going to feel a mild sense of dread, rising after a while to an urgent conviction that they need to be anywhere else.
I thumb my phone back to the start screen, and look for a signal. There’s nothing showing. That shouldn’t be possible, not on a major network in the middle of a city, but there are zero bars. Do the bad guys have a jammer? It wouldn’t be unheard of. And they knew enough to lay a snare right outside the New Annexe, one tailored for me . . . that is not good news. I sit down behind a tree, careful to check that I’m concealed from the path by that stand of stinging nettles, and then I do something that’s overdue: I compose an email to the two people I know I can trust—Angleton and Mo. The JesusPhone is smart enough to keep looking for a connection, and to send the mail as soon as it snags a signal. Then I compose a slightly different email to a whole bunch of people I don’t entirely trust, remembering to include Angleton and Mo on the recipient list, and send it. Now that should set the cat among the pigeons. My heartbeat is just about back to normal by the time I finish, and my lungs aren’t burning anymore, so I slide my phone into an inside jacket pocket and stand up.
Click-clack. “Don’t move.”
12.
COUNTERMEASURES
The Fuller Memorandum l-4 Page 21