Mo nods jerkily. “Yes, that’s very interesting,” she says distractedly.
“If someone had convinced them that the time was right now, not in a couple more years, they might be induced to premature action. And if that someone allowed them to obtain a falsified, corrupted version of the Fuller Memorandum, they might well try to use it to release their master—”
Mo focuses. “The Sleeper. You’re not saying it’s N’yar lath-Hotep itself?”
“No, nothing that powerful: there is a hierarchy of horrors here, a ladder that must be climbed. But the thing in the pyramid can set the process in motion, starting a chain of events that will ultimately open the doors of uncreation and release the Black Pharaoh. To do so, they would best wait for the conjunction of chance; but it is in the nature of mortal cultists that they are impatient. And James is of the opinion that they should be encouraged to indulge their fatal impatience.”
“I see.”
“No, I don’t believe you do. The Black Brotherhood are at their most dangerous when they work within an organization that is unaware it has been infiltrated. Your—husband. Has be been missing long?” She shakes her head. “Exactly. Something alerted you?” She nods. “James sent him on an errand, yes?” She nods again. “Imagine you are an initiate of the Brotherhood. You see an agent of a hostile organization, and you have acquired the Sternberg Fragment and are prepared to carry out the ritual of summoning and binding the hungry ghost. Would it not be to your advantage to pick, as a carrier, that hostile agent? So that you can send him back in among them, ridden by your own demon ...”
Mo’s pupils dilate. Her face is pale. “You think they’re going to try to possess Bob.”
Panin spreads his hands palm-down on the table. “It is a logical supposition, nothing more.” He meets her gaze. “He is tapped for rapid advancement, is he not? James’s personal secretary, I gather. Years ago, he established a reputation as a casual layabout, a bit of a bumbler. It served him well in his field days. We see reports, you know. A very talented man, with a very beautiful, very talented wife. He will go far, if he is not eaten by a hungry ghost. Or worse.”
“What could be worse?” Mo says bitterly.
Panin shrugs. “Firstly, they have a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. Whatever James saw fit to concoct, I suppose, not expecting them to perform it on his personal secretary. Secondly—the preta they wish to summon has already been summoned: it is, in fact, already walking around in flesh. Who knows what the ritual might dredge up, given a dangling pointer into the demon-haunted void? And thirdly ...”
“Thirdly?” Her voice begins to rise dangerously.
“We have merely been assuming that the copy of the Fuller Memorandum that James gave your husband contains a corrupted copy of the Sternberg Fragment. But James did not intend the situation to spin this far from his control. The worst possible case is that they have the real thing, the Sternberg Fragment and the document describing the binding of the Eater of Souls, and that they know what to do with it.”
JONQUIL THE PSYCHOPATHIC SLOANE RANGER HACKS AWAY AT my arm for what feels like a year and is probably a bit less than a minute. Then she gets annoyed. “Julian, do something about the screaming, will you? It’s giving me a headache.”
Julian Headless-Shotgun pulls a leather glove out of one of his pockets and tries to stuff it in my mouth. I clamp my jaw shut, shivering and hyperventilating, but he responds by squeezing my nostrils painfully. After a few seconds I surrender to the inevitable. The glove fingers taste of sweat and sour, dead leather. Chewing on them helps.
Did I mention I’ve got a low pain threshold?
Jonquil goes back to hacking on my arm. The pain is excruciating. If you’ve ever been bitten by a dog—this is worse. The scalpel makes a clean incision, but I can still feel blood welling up and dripping along my arm. The pain isn’t sharp—it’s a widespread violent ache. After a while it feels as if my arm has been clubbed repeatedly with a meat tenderizer. She hacks and saws and tugs—the tugging is the worst, it’s so bad my vision blurs and I feel light-headed—and then it stops.
But not the pain.
“He’s bleeding. Gareth, fetch a sock and a bandage at once. And a plate.”
I can’t see very well: my eyes are blurring. I can’t seem to get enough air through my nose, even when I blow out around the saliva-sticky glove. My heart is hammering and I feel sick with pain. There’s a hole in my arm and it feels like it’s about half a meter long and goes right down to the bone. I’m dying, I think dizzily, even though I know better. Jonquil and her muscle wouldn’t want to risk their precious All-Highest’s ire. I lie there moaning quietly for a while, then Gareth returns. “You, lie still,” Jonquil says, and shoves what feels like a cast-iron cannonball into the hole in my arm. I try not to scream as she roughly winds a gauze bandage around the wadded-up sock, then stands up to inspect her work.
Julian bends over and holds a plate under my nose. Two red and blubbery lumps of raw meat about as long as my index finger sit in the middle of a thin pool of blood. “Anyone for sashimi?” he asks. Jonquil giggles; Gareth makes lip-smacking noises.
“Jolly good, that man.” Julian’s accent is plummy, camped-up; he peels one of the strips of meat off the plate and stuffs it in his mouth.
Jonquil follows suit, passing the plate to Gareth. “Nom nom nom,” she says around her mouthful. “Chewy!”
Goatfuckers, I think fuzzily, then everything goes blank.
The next thing I know, Jonquil’s hand is hovering in front of my nose. She’s holding a couple of white cylindrical tablets. “Here, swallow these—oh.” Her other hand tugs at the glove. I let go of it. She drops the tablets into my mouth, careful not to let her fingers close enough for me to bite. As if I would; all she’d need to do is breathe on that fucking hole in my arm. It’s kind of hard to bite someone’s fingers off when you’re screaming in mortal agony. I try to spit the tablets out but she pinches my nostrils shut. “Naughty naughty!” I hold out until my lungs are burning, but there’s only one way this contest of wills can end. “They’re only pain-killers,” she chides. “By the way, if you don’t swallow them toot sweet I’ll grind them up and inject them into you, there’s a good boy.”
Fucking Goatfuckers. She’s entirely capable of making good on the threat; I swallow. “What do I taste like?” I ask, trying to distract myself.
“Like raw pork, only not as smoky. Want some? Oh, sorry: the boys have eaten it all.” She giggles again. “Don’t worry, give the Coproxamol time to work and you’ll feel fine for your interview with Mummy.”
My heart’s still hammering, and I feel a little dizzy. My arm is cold and damp all the way down to my wrist. I don’t want to think about how much blood I must have lost. Half a liter? More? Fucking bastard goatfucking cultists. I flash on a momentary fantasy, digging my thumbs into her eye sockets—but only momentary. I have a bad feeling about my right arm. It’s throbbing like an overheated diesel engine, sending waves of pain radiating up to my shoulder and down to my elbow. I don’t know whether I can bend it. Hell, I probably need surgery to repair what these fine young cannibals have just done. Anything that takes two arms—forget it.
“What are you going to do with me?” I ask.
“Patience, patience! You’re going on a magical mystery tour! It’ll be fun!” She turns to Gareth. “What’s he got in his pocketses?”
“This.” Gareth produces my wallet and opens it in her direction. She jumps back with a hiss as my warrant card falls out. “Ooh, nasty! You naughty boy!” She grabs the wallet and turns it round. “Credit card, debit card, driving license, library card, Tesco clubcard. Huh.” She pulls out a solitary twenty-pound note. “Civil servant. Right.”
Gareth and Julian seem to think it’s funny. Civil servants shop at Tesco, don’t have platinum credit cards, and suffer being eaten alive by cannibals in the course of their duty—and they think it’s funny? A vast sense of indignation threatens to overwhelm me. Fucking bastard
over-privileged snooty upper-class goatfucking cultists.
“Ooh, look! Shiny!” Gareth has found my NecronomiPod.
“What’s that—ooh!” Julian leans over, and they nearly bang their heads together, cooing over the glamour-shedding curves of the JesusPhone. “Wow! Here, let me feel that—”
“Mine! Preciouss! Is it an iPod Touch?”
“No I think it’s a—” Julian straightens up suddenly. “It’s an iPhone, isn’t it? How do you turn it off?”
I lie on the foam pad, a puddle of dizzy throbbing misery.
“Why would you want to switch it off?” Gareth demands.
“Because it’s a phone. They can trace them, can’t they?”
“Let’s see ...” I hear a familiar sound effect as his finger finds the home key. “How does this work—ooh! Wow. What are all these icons?”
“I thought you knew—”
“Yes, but he’s been messing with the home screen.” Gareth finds the earbuds, untangles the white wires trailing from the jacket pocket. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
“Guys.” Jonquil sounds tense. “We don’t have time for this—”
I lie there, trying to be invisible, hoping Gareth is as stupid as he seems.
“It must have an off button somewhere,” Julian mumbles. “Shiny ...”
“Mine!” Gareth clutches it possessively. The earbuds are wrapped around his hand, convolvulus climbing.
Jonquil clears her throat: “If you can’t switch it off, leave it behind. It’s time to go. Now.”
“Bah.” Julian shakes himself and steps back. Bastard, I think. “Put it down, Gareth—”
“Mine!” Gareth squeaks, and plugs the earbuds into his head as his thumb is inexorably dragged to the NecronomiPod’s home button.
“Stop him—” Jonquil is too late, and she and Julian are clearly not B-Team members in my eyes because she steps behind Julian as he grabs up his shotgun and brings it to bear on Gareth—
Who is limned in black, dancing to a different beat as the writhing white wires drill deep into his consciousness through the shortest possible path, drilling and eating and consuming the unauthorized intruder who has had the temerity to plug himself into a device running a Laundry countermeasure suite—
And he’s jitterbugging across the floor, a shadowy silhouette of his former self twitching as if he’s plugged into a live wire. It only lasts for a couple of seconds, then the ’Pod finishes discharging its lethal load through his brain and Gareth’s body drops to the floor, crashing across my legs like a dead weight.
The white earbuds roll away from his corpse, satiated and somehow fat.
“You bastard—” Julian is across the room and the shotgun muzzle is a subway tunnel filling my right eye.
“Stop!”
Julian takes a deep, shuddering breath. The gun doesn’t waver.
“Gareth fucked up,” Jonquil says shakily.
“Don’t care. He’s got to die.” I can see a snarl building in Julian’s chest, sense the tension in the set of his jaw. I’ve stopped breathing: if I move—
“Gareth failed the All-Highest.” Jonquil is standing behind Julian now. “He was weak. He surrendered to a naff little glamour. Are you going to surrender to a stupid impulse, Julian? Are you weak? Do you want to hear what All-Highest will say if you damage the vessel?”
For a moment Julian does nothing—then he breathes out. “No.” He squints at me along the barrel of his gun. “You’re going to die, meat. And I’m going to watch you go.” The shotgun swings away suddenly, pointing at the floor.
“What are we going to do with that?” he asks Jonquil, gesturing sideways at Gareth’s body.
“Drag it downstairs and stack it with the others.” She shrugs dismissively.
“The vessel’s phone—”
“This for his phone.” She kicks the NecronomiPod; it caroms off the wall and skids beneath the chest of drawers. “Gareth’s safe to touch now. Get him downstairs.”
“How are you going to move the prisoner?”
“I’m sure he can walk.” Jonquil rests a hand on my right shoulder. I shudder. “You can walk, can’t you, Mr. Howard? Please say you can walk? Because if you can’t—” She moves her hand a couple of centimeters down my arm and squeezes.
“I can walk!” I yelp, gasping for breath. “Let me . . . up ...”
Julian grabs me under the left armpit—the undamaged one—and heaves me to my knees. I try to get my feet under me, and everything goes gray for a few seconds, but I don’t faint. I’m just gasping for breath and dizzy, and a bit nauseous, and my right arm feels awful.
“That’s good,” says Jonquil, taking my right elbow as Julian lets go and bends down to pick up their phone-fiddling former friend. “Now you’re just going to step this way, Mr. Howard, and then you’re going to follow Julian downstairs and get in the back of the car and sit quietly, aren’t you?”
I nod. Bastard Goatfuckers. If they think a blood-soaked man with his arms handcuffed behind his back won’t draw attention in the average London suburban street—
Shit, I think despairingly as I reach the bottom of the staircase and Julian opens a side door onto a garage, for B-Team cultists these two have really got their shit together. Jonquil opens the rear door of the silver Mercedes saloon and Julian grunts as he slides Gareth’s body onto the passenger seat and positions the corpse so that it looks like it’s sleeping. Then he opens the boot of the silver Mercedes saloon and pushes me into it headfirst, so that I land on my right arm in a blaze of agony. And that’s the last clear thought I think for a while.
14.
THE MUMMY’S TOMB
PUTNEY HIGH STREET, ABOUT FIFTEEN KILOMETERS SOUTHWEST of the center of the capital, is a bustling shopping and retail area, humming with shops and pubs and other civic amenities: the rail and tube stations, the local magistrate’s court, fire stations. Leafy tree-lined roads curl away behind the high street, host to uncountable thousands of houses and maisonettes, every curb crammed with the parked cars of commuter-land.
Right now it’s early evening. A fire-control truck—bulky and red, its load bed occupied by a boxy control room—is drawn up on the drive-through parking area of the court, its nearside wheels on the pavement, blue lights strobing. A couple of police cars wait nearby, ready to clear the way if the truck starts to roll.
Despite appearances, it isn’t really a fire-control truck: it’s owned by OCCULUS—Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations—that branch of the military that my employers call in when a situation, to use Angleton’s ladder of apocalypse, escalates above Rung One. And right now, its occupants are doing what soldiers frequently do best: waiting for a call.
A short, wiry fellow with horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a tweed jacket with patched elbows over a green wool sweater, lounges in an office seat in front of a desk with a laptop and a bunch of communications gear bolted to it. He’s prematurely balding—he isn’t forty yet—and his skin is slightly translucent, as if aged beyond his years. There’s an olive-green telephone handset jammed between his shoulder and his right ear, and he’s twiddling his fingers impatiently as he waits on the line.
“Yes? Yes?” he demands busily.
“Connecting you now, sir ...” More static. The handset doesn’t lead to a phone, mobile or otherwise, but to a TETRA terminal dedicated to OCCULUS’s use: an early nineties digital radio technology, horribly obsolete, but one that the government has been locked into by a thirty-year contract. “Dr. Angleton is on the line.”
“Ah, James! Are you there?”
“Major Barnes?”
“Yes, it’s me! Any word on our boy?”
“We can find him.” Angleton’s voice is clear. Barnes sits up unconsciously expectant.
Farther back in the OCCULUS truck, a man wearing a bright yellow HAZMAT suit glances up from the H&K MP5 he’s checking for the third time. Another HAZMAT-suited soldier, shorter and stockier, knuckles him in the back. “Hey, S
cary, nobody ever tell you it’s rude to eavesdrop?”
“Sorry, sir.”
Major Barnes ignores them: Angleton is talking. “I have a preliminary fix and I’m on my way over right now. I should be with you in about five minutes. Once I’m on location I can guide you to the target in person.”
“Are you sure that’s advisable?”
“No, but I’ll leave tactical command up to you; the problem is, I don’t have an exact fix to within less than a hundred meters. I need to be on the spot.”
Major Barnes swears silently. “All right, we’ll have to work with that. What exactly do you think we’re facing?”
“No idea,” Angleton says cheerfully, “but whatever we’re looking at, it’s been set up by a cell of the Black Brethren. If we’re lucky it’ll prove to be a safe house with just a couple of residents. If not . . . remember the Scouts’ motto?”
“Be prepared,” Barnes echoes, wearing an expression of pained martyrdom. “Dib dib dib and all that. I hope this isn’t going to go pear-shaped . . .”
“The good news is, I’ve raised a SCORPION STARE control order. So once we know what we’re looking at, you should have no trouble containing the outbreak.”
“How wonderful,” Barnes says sourly. “Are you anticipating mass civilian casualties?”
“Hopefully not.” Angleton pauses. “What I’m hoping for is low-hanging fruit. Ah, with you in a moment—”
Another police car pulls up, lights flickering; as Major Barnes glances out of the truck’s side window, he sees the rear door open and Angleton unfolding himself. He looks back at the HAZMAT-wearers behind him. “Showtime coming up. Sitrep, Jim?”
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