“A, a final solution?” Vikram asks, utterly aghast.
The PM looks primly shocked. “Absolutely not! What do you take me for? This is the very model of an enlightened and forward-looking government! The indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is wasteful and unappealing—although I’m sure there are some reality TV shows that could use a supply of Hunger Games contestants, ha ha! No, I just want the pernicious virus of the wrong kind of monotheism contained. Starve it of the oxygen of publicity and it’ll suffocate eventually, no need for gas chambers, what?”
“But sir,” Chris speaks up again—unwisely, in my opinion—“we have a legal commitment to religious freedom—”
The PM holds up a hand: “Maybe we do, but they don’t, and if they get out of control again we’ll end up with another Akhenaten. That’s where they get it from, you know—once you allow one god to take over a pantheon and suppress the worship of rivals, it never ends well unless you’re the first mover. But don’t worry about the religious freedom issue! It’ll be taken care of in the Great Repeal Bill I’ve directed the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel to draw up.” He shakes his head dismissively as one of the police officers refills his cup from a brilliantly polished silver teapot. “Now, on a happier note, I’d like to hear how plans are coming along for the Tzompantli that will replace the Marble Arch those idiots erected in place of the Tyburn tree…”
Say whatever else you will about him, Fabian is full of unpleasant and exciting surprises, and always three steps ahead of the rest of us! He reminds me of a certain ex of mine in that respect. But it’s a bad idea to enthusiastically applaud everything the PM comes out with. Sometimes he says outrageous things deliberately to smoke out flatterers and yes-men. The way to survive these sessions is to pay attention to how his inner circle react. So I take my cue from Mrs. Carpenter, his chief of staff, who is nodding along thoughtfully, and match my reactions to hers. And that’s how I get through the next half hour while Hector MacArthur—who has apparently landed the job of coordinating the festivities for Her Majesty’s ninetieth birthday—describes some sort of bizarre titanium and glass sculpture that he asked Foster + Partners to design for the junction of Park Lane and Oxford Street.
Whatever a Tzompantli is, it keeps the PM happy, and that’s never a bad thing. When the PM is unhappy He has a tendency to meddle and break things. Last month it was Prince Charles (no biggie: I gather he should be out of hospital just as soon as he stops weeping uncontrollably); this month it was the US Ambassador (who made the mistake of personally asking for a tax break for his golf course in Ayrshire). From the way He’s talking, next month it could be the Church of England; and then where will we turn for tea, sympathy, and exorcisms?
Finally the fountain of bizarre winds down. “Well, it’s been lovely to see everyone,” the PM assures us, “but I really mustn’t keep you any longer, I’m sure you all have important things to be getting on with!” It’s a dismissal, and we all stand. “Not you, Baroness Karnstein,” He says as the shell-shocked survivors of Mahogany Row file out of the drawing room, “or you, Iris.” The PM smiles, and for a moment I see a flickering vision where His face should be: an onion-skin Matryoshka doll of circular shark-toothed maws, lizard-man faces, and insectile hunger. “A word in my study if you don’t mind. Right this way.”
Oh dear, I think. I follow Him into the entrance hall, where the others are collecting their coats and filing out into the skin-crisping afternoon overcast, then we walk through a corridor leading deep into the rabbit warren of Number 10. Eventually we come to the PM’s study. The curtains are drawn, for which I am grateful. There’s a small conference table at one end, but the PM heads straight towards a small cluster of chairs and a sofa that surround a coffee table. He waves me towards a seat but I bow my head. “You first, Majesty.”
Behind Him Iris briefly smiles approval. Her boss sinks into the armchair and nods at me. “Now will you sit?” He asks, and I hurry to comply. In public and in office He’s the Prime Minister, but Iris and I know better. He is a physical incarnation of the Black Pharaoh, N’yar Lat-Hotep, royalty that was ancient long before ancient Britons first covered themselves in woad and worshipped at Stonehenge. The Queen may still open Parliament, but she does so by His grace and indulgence. “I suppose you’re wondering why I invited you here,” He says, then grins like a skull that’s just uttered the world’s deadliest joke.
“Yes, Your Majesty.” I sit up straight, knees together, my hands folded in my lap. I briefly try to meet His gaze, but even though I am myself a thing that can soulgaze demons, it’s like staring at the sun—if the sun had gone supernova and turned into a black hole a billion years ago.
“I have a small problem,” He begins, then pauses expectantly.
Okay, here it comes. I tense, digging the points of my expensively capped incisors into my lower lip: “Is it something I can help with?” I ask, because there’s not really anything else you can say when a living god looks at you like that.
“Ye-es, I believe you might.” The gates of hell flash me a twinkle from what passes for His eyes. “Tell me, Baroness”—he already knows the answer to the question, He’s just toying with me—“have you ever visited the United States?”
* * *
Hello again, dear posthumous diary reader.
I know this is a lot to take in all at once, so for what it’s worth you have my apologies. But the CV I started with doesn’t give the correct context for my position under the New Management. I may no longer be Mhari Murphy, civil servant, from SOE Q-Division, but Dame Mhari Murphy, BSc (hons), MBA, FIC, DBE, styled Baroness Karnstein, and member of the House of Lords—but I am also, to use a technical term, utterly and unambiguously boned.
This is not my official work journal: I can afford to be honest here.
It used to be Best Practice in SOE for high-level personnel—line sorcerers and staff managers—to keep an up-to-date logbook so that in event of their incapacitation, retirement, or death in the line of duty their work would remain documented. In my experience, if you keep a written record of your wrongdoings you will only provide ammunition for your enemies, so I generally don’t do that. I have an orderly mind and I try to apply procedures humanely but exhaustively and keep within my remit. Work journals are for the experimentally inclined—hackers and the like—and my official work journal is mostly just a transcript of my weekly time sheets and performance appraisals.
Prior to CASE NIGHTMARE RED and the Leeds Incursion this was never an issue for me. I wasn’t engaged in active ops, and first I was too junior and then TPCF didn’t have the same requirement. (Dr. O’Brien doesn’t consider it useful to overdocument the antics of half-trained amateur superheroes.) Then everything went topsy-turvy and upside down while Continuity Operations were in effect, and keeping an up-to-date logbook was the least of my worries.
Since the installation of the New Management I’ve been stuck in experimental, improvisational mode. Nobody has ever chaired a House of Lords Select Committee on blood magic while working for a Risen God. And life, as they say, comes at you fast. Institutional knowledge retention is the name of the game, and it’s especially difficult when the institution is vulnerable to ideological purges. If you write something in an official logbook it may be used in evidence against you. But if you don’t leave any written record at all, and you die, then you leave your allies at a disadvantage.
Which is why I’m maintaining this secret diary.
And if you’re reading this and I’m not already dead, then may whatever gods you believe in have mercy on my soul, because the Prime Minister won’t.
* * *
Back when I worked with Mo and Ramona on the Transhuman Police Coordination Force executive, we made a habit of going out for a team-building exercise exactly once a week. Team building in this context meant drinking wine until we fell over. When you manage a rapid-reaction force you can’t afford to show any signs of stress in the workplace, because stressed-out management is contagious an
d degrades mission effectiveness. Hence the girls’ nights out in a non-workplace environment, with companions who had the security clearance to hear what I was moaning about. Not to mention enough alcohol to provide next-morning deniability if it all got too embarrassing.
I’m pretty sure those sessions saved Mo’s sanity, what with her violin gnawing on the corners of her mind. I don’t know what they did for Ramona, but she seemed to enjoy it, too. Me, I just needed the regular reminder that I was still officially human. But Ramona isn’t around any more—she got recalled, nobody seems to know what her people (BLUE HADES, the abyssal Deep Ones) make of the New Management—and Mo, Dr. O’Brien, is unavailable. Or maybe I’m just too much of a coward to talk to her since she … changed. As for family, my parents and kid sister aren’t cleared to know anything about my work (anyway, even if they were they’d be utterly useless), and I can’t vent at Fuckboy because reasons. Which means there’s only one person to turn to—and I know exactly how to bribe her.
“’Seph, darling, do you have anything planned for this evening, or are you free for—yes, absolutely! Listen, I need to pick your brain, so shall we make it my treat? I can sign you into the dining room at work and expense it if you meet me at the Cromwell Green visitor’s entrance at six—er, expect security screening? But you won’t believe the wine list! And all the latest gossip, of course!”
I hang up, then call the maître d’hôtel to reserve a table in the Peers’ Dining Room, because they tend to fill up fast on the evening before a debate. The chamber’s been uncommonly busy of late, processing a deluge of new legislation. The PM doesn’t really hold with new-fangled ideas like the Rights of Man (or Woman), let alone egalitarianism and democracy, but he works with what he’s got, and in this instance that means a House of Lords stuffed with life peers.
Most people think life peerages are handed out as retirement sinecures for front-rank politicians. But it’s also a means to recruit experts the government wants on tap to scrutinize bills in progress. Law professors, barristers, journalists, economists, historians: the sort of people who can’t be arsed going into politics as a career, but who are nevertheless deemed to have Useful Opinions to contribute to Parliament. That’s why there are so many life peers, and why they’re drawn from a surprisingly broad spectrum of British public life. The old aristocracy barely get a foot in the door any more. The only reason any of them are left is that the Lords Reform Bill got stitched up in a back-room deal in 2012, derailing the most recent attempt at fully modernizing the upper chamber.
Back when it was called the Invisible College, and “computer” was a job description for a working mathematician, the Laundry was funded out of the House of Lords black budget. It’s almost inevitable that these days we have people inside the House, supervising the muggles. But I still wake up some mornings wondering how I, a nice middle-class girl from Essex, got here, and how much longer I’ve got to make use of the perks of office before I’m found out.
On the dot of six o’clock I’m waiting in the lobby to meet Persephone Hazard as she comes through the metal-detector arch and retrieves her handbag from the X-ray screening machine. Yes, Westminster has airport-grade security, but the uniformed men and women on duty are courteous and polite, as if you’re graciously doing them a favor by permitting them to check your possessions for dangerous items.
“’Seph!” I call.
’Seph looks more like the popular conception of a baroness than I do. Her makeup is understated, her clothing fits with the eerie precision of couture, and her jewelry is discreet. She moves with the grace of a dancer—or a martial arts instructor, which she is. (Mind you, the popular conception is wrong: most baronesses these days are slightly eccentric middle-aged law professors—that, or retired politicians. Sorry to puncture your illusions.) Not for the first time I wonder what I’m doing in this house instead of her. Certainly if the New Management wants a trustworthy pair of hands to keep the Lords on track with occult affairs, we could do worse.
She beams at me, trots over, and kisses both cheeks, stinging my oversensitized nose with her jasmine scent. “Mhari! It’s been too long. How have you been?” She leans back, inspecting me. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything is absolutely splendid!” I assure her, with such gushing irony that she blinks. “No, it’s not, but how about we leave that until after dinner?” I take her arm. “Been to any good gallery openings lately?”
The Peers’ Dining Room in the House of Lords is one of those peculiar British institutions that somehow combines a snobbish conviction of utter superiority with a pronounced cross-Channel culinary cringe. It’s easy to believe that in rooms almost identical to this2, blue-blooded nobles conspired to ravage the Indian subcontinent, colonize North America, deport their criminal classes to Australia, and build a railway from Cape Town to Cairo. It’s all polished wood-paneled walls, paintings of distinguished alumnae (mostly of Prime Ministerial caliber, dating to the eighteenth century or earlier), and small tables dressed in crisp white linen, gleaming silverware, and crystal. The occupants, in suits and dresses, look as if they belong in the boardrooms of British industry. And the stunningly good wine list is subsidized by the nation. “What do you fancy?” I ask, as Persephone reads the food menu.
A minute frown wrinkles her brow. “Hmm. This is a little…”
“Mundane?”
“I was going to say, high-end gastropub?” She puts the menu down and shakes her head. “However, the potted confit of sea trout and crab will be an acceptable starter, and I suppose it will go well enough with the baked salmon with tagliatelle as a main…”
The British ruling class was never noted for its expertise in haut cuisine. Rumors that they conquered a quarter of the planet in search of a decent meal cannot be discounted. For decades, the dirty little secret of the Westminster dining experience was that the chefs were mostly trained in Paris. This will change when Westminster closes for extensive reconstruction next year—there are rumors that we are going to acquire our very own sushi conveyor-belt restaurant—but for the time being, dining in the House of Lords is like taking a TARDIS trip back to 1955.
However, if your real motive for eating is to line your stomach before exploring the Crown’s wine cellar, while discussing your utterly top-secret assignment from Number 10 with one of the very few people who share your security clearance, the Lords’ Dining Room offers one valuable perquisite that no public restaurant can match: it’s the most exclusive and surveillance-free club bar in London.
Over the next hour Persephone and I tuck into posh pub grub as I listen to her make small talk about fund-raisers for charities and curtain-raisers for operas—the stuff she amuses herself with when she’s pretending to be a rich socialite rather than the most powerful independent intelligence witch in the UK—and I gossip about the weird traditions and colorful customs of the office I’ve landed in, but nothing of any consequence.
Finally the casual chat winds down. A different waiter arrives with the dessert wine list—I opt for a tawny port—and once he retreats ’Seph leans back and watches me. “So. Spill it. What eats you?”
“I had a meeting at Number 10 this morning. One of His blue-sky sessions, except that He held me back for a confidential chat afterwards.” I shudder, remembering the way He made me feel, like a quarter-century flashback to being a naughty schoolgirl carpeted for giving lip to Mrs. Barnes in History again. “He gave me extra homework, and I’m afraid I’m going to fail the exam.”
“Homework.” Persephone Hazard tilts her head a few degrees to the left and gives me a raven-eyed stare. “Hmm.” She knows exactly what I am, so the lack of immediate reassurance is distinctly unreassuring. “What kind of assignment?”
I’ve backed myself into this position deliberately so I’ll be forced to share the grisly details. There are no excuses for leading her up to this point and then chickening out; so I tell her, which only takes a minute or so, and then I wait.
Persephone thinks for
a bit, then finally shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says softly, then reaches across the table and touches the back of my wrist: “I’m so sorry, Mhari, but I’m afraid you’re right: you really are boned, and this time not even Mahogany Row can save you.”
* * *
Hello again, diary, and welcome to this evening’s episode of I Am So Doomed.
The PM, as I said previously, likes to meddle. That’s the only explanation for my assignment that I can come up with. (That, and the PM is so much smarter than a merely human sorcerer that He’s beyond terrifying. He knows everything that’s going on—I mean, you can’t hold anything back from Him. He keeps track of seemingly unrelated items you wouldn’t imagine Him being involved in, and then casually pulls them up in conversation and shows how they are interrelated, and it all makes a horrible kind of sense.)
“According to the Identity and Passport Office you have never visited North America,” He said with an avuncular smile. “Which means that unless you have an as-yet-undisclosed covert operational identity, your biometrics are not on the US immigration department’s database.”
I stared at the carpet. “That’s true,” I admitted. When I worked for the bank as an executive assistant, my boss Oscar used to jet around the globe and attend summit meetings. Meanwhile, I was stuck in the office keeping the wheels on his wagon turning and in contact with the ground. Maybe with another couple of years of seniority I’d have made vice-president and gotten to do some jet-setting of my own, but PHANG syndrome happened instead. That put me back inside the Laundry, where any international holiday travel plans have to be pre-approved six months in advance. Finally we hit CASE NIGHTMARE RED—and I gather British Airways laid off a third of their staff last month.
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