“Officer Penrose, returning with supplies,” he announces.
“Come forward. That’s close enough.” Sylvia’s voice is harsh, her usual cordiality eroded to its rocky foundations by circumstance. “Okay, Sam. Who is the President?”
“Arthur,” Sam answers wearily, then yawns again. He’s so tired he barely registers the footsteps of the front-of-the-house crew as they emerge. He hears Senior Officer Mattingley’s gravelly voice as if from a considerable distance: “Your ward’s taken a hit.” As casual an observation as if the ballistic vest he isn’t wearing had soaked up a bullet.
“Yeah, there were gimps at Walmart. I mean, silver gimp suits. Dun-don’t know what they were but they were guarding the exit, like security. They didn’t pull me in but I felt it heat up.”
“Silver gimp suits.”
“He checks out clean, sir,” Sylvia confirms. “No trackers or soul-suckers attached.”
“Okay, let’s get the truck unloaded.”
“Yessir,” he slurs, swaying.
Mattingley notices because he steps alongside Sam as he unlocks the tailgate. “I’m bringing your down-time forward,” Matt tells him. “Looks like you need it bad.”
“Yes sir.” Sam hefts four bags full of chilled items. “You’re not wrong.”
Mattingley nods sharply. “Let’s get this lot stored,” he says. “Then you can tell us all about the gimp suits.”
* * *
There’s a row house in downtown DC, just outside the museums and government buildings that cluster around the Mall and the Capitol, that is one of several owned by an obscure but wealthy think tank. Sometimes its donors borrow its conferencing facilities for meetings, and this morning a ground-floor room is filling with private-sector executives. They’re here for a face-to-face meeting and a very exclusive in-person backgrounder about a very special government project.
This is not a gathering of actual CEOs, captains of industry who run fractional-trillion-dollar enterprises. Those men (and a few women) have so many demands on their time that a group appearance by them has to be scheduled months in advance. The guests today are merely vice-presidents or above. They are, however, all executives in corporations with a market cap of at least ten billion dollars, and have sufficient authority to spend money and initiate projects. Their employers all have a federal services division or some sort of process for bidding on government contracts, and they’re here today because a previously obscure member of the intelligence community has hinted that something really big is in the offing and their attendance would be profitable.
(Also, they’ve been having very odd dreams.)
The meeting is due to kick off with a presentation about the agency, and then a description of what the agency wants from its suppliers. None of them are familiar with it as yet. But the invitation came via the right channels, and the Global Business Forum offices are often used for para-governmental events like this dog-and-pony show, and all the right faces are here, so …
“Hi, Rick! Surprise!” Ira Oates spots a familiar face across the lobby and picks up his coffee mug. Rick Martini from AMD does a double-take across the room as he spots Ira weaving towards him.
“Ira! Hey, what brings you here?”
They shake cautiously, in concession to each other’s handicaps—Rick has one wrist in a splint, Ira bears an over-full coffee cup—then Ira shrugs carefully. “Same as you, perhaps? A tender from the Operational Phenomenology Agency?”
“Yeah.” Rick’s poker face is in play. “Although why they want us here…” He shrugs back. Rick is at AMD these days, working on fab line configuration, and Ira is part of Apple’s we-could-tell-you-but-then-we’d-have-to-kill-you internal chip design team. Before that, they were both at Intel—but that was long ago. “Maybe they want a better baseband backdoor?”
Ira snorts. “Not going to happen, my friend—” Then he does another double-take. “Celeste? Celeste Travers? What the hell?”
Celeste, who has just arrived, is wearing the power-suit uniform of an older industry. She’s the kind of sales manager who only needs to close two deals a year to contribute nine digits of turnover to her employer, United Launch Alliance, a consortium of Lockheed and Boeing that builds satellite launchers. She’s smiling, or maybe baring her teeth, at a fireplug South African entrepreneur with slit-like eyes who has been making waves on the internet when his experimental boosters haven’t been exploding: a rock star type who’s a couple of levels above anyone else in the room. “What’s he doing here?” Rick mutters under his breath.
“Probably didn’t want to feel left out.” But Ira’s eyes are wide. “This is not what I expected.”
“No, really?” Rick nods his head at the far corner of the room. “I see Google, I see Microsoft, I see HP, and they’re not even sneering at each other. I see aerospace, emphasis on space. And who’s that guy?”
“Exxon.”
“This makes no sense,” Ira complains as a bright-eyed host announces that the conference room is now ready and would they please proceed inside.
They file into a compact, well-padded lecture theater with full audiovisual support and power and network sockets at every seat. At the front of the room sets a podium and an A/V desk. The lectern is positioned in the middle of a powder-blue carpet featuring an ornate circular design picked out in silver. Ira finds himself sitting next to Rick and another middle-aged emeritus engineer from a second-tier aerospace corporation. “Ira, from Apple.” He offers his hand. “Do you know what this is about?”
“Hi, I’m Frank, Astradyne Corp. And I’ve got no idea either, except it’s something to do with satellites and communications networking.” Frank shrugs self-deprecatingly. “So Apple’s going into the launch business now?”
“I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.” Ira says with a straight face, then leans back in his chair: “Hey—”
A person steps onto the podium, then walks behind the lectern and opens a laptop that’s already plugged in on top of it. They’re miked up, wireless, and—
Ira squints. He? She? They? Ira can’t tell. Can’t tell the color of his—or her—suit, can’t even look at their face: his eyes slide sideways whenever he tries to look at them.
“Good morning, everyone!” says the person on the podium. It stands in the middle of a glowing silver pentacle in a circle, surrounded by some really fancy rippling laser-projected script, almost like the inscription on the One Ring in the Peter Jackson movies. Two figures in skin-tight silver body stockings flank him, standing motionless at either side of the podium. They’re covered from head to toe: superheroes anonymous, like life-size Academy Award trophies.
“I’m very glad to see you all here today! We at the OPA recognize that you’re all terrifically busy people, so we’re going to keep this introduction as short as possible, but we hope to do business with you in the very near future—yes, all of you—because we’ve been tasked with setting up and running a federal government project as big as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon landings rolled into one.”
Ira sits up. Everybody sits up. Both those programs soaked up a visible percentage of the federal government’s entire budget for years on end, and a single project as big as both of them combined is unprecedented. There’s as much money at stake here as the Gulf War, all in one mouth-watering, delicious project. He can feel tension rise in the room as the speaker continues, in an odd, rolling cadence that emphasizes alternate words.
“Here in America we have lost our sense of purpose, come adrift from our destiny. People feel an emptiness in their souls.” On the wall behind the podium, a montage appears: crying children, car wrecks, a column of tanks in a war zone. “We in the Operational Phenomenology Agency feel this deeply—”
Ira pinches himself awake. The cadence of the presentation feels intimately, creepily familiar. It’s playing the same chords on his subconscious as the big Apple keynote presentations, back when Steve Jobs was showrunner. The master salesman was a mesmerizing
speaker who used every trick in the crowd psychology playbook, mixing neurolinguistic programming, sensory saturation by background imagery and music, and a little something extra to captivate his audience. Ira was too low down the totem pole to ever go on stage at one of those events, but he knows how they work. He’s even been trained to do it himself in supplier meetings. But this is bigger. The little pinch of magical pixie dust, the something else that made it work so well, has been replaced by the entire goddamn Gobi Desert. The speech feels suffocating and heavy, freighted with a willed compulsion to submit and obey, as it batters against his mind. Ira fights it, but his shoulders sag with the strain.
“We have lost sight of our national leadership, and it is vital that we recover the visionary leadership that we deserve, the strong father who will make America great again, whose mind we can emulate and channel using the magic of computation that has brought us so many benefits—
“Which is where you can make a contribution, my friends. We have a vision of a new world, a world where American ingenuity will leverage our leadership in space and computing to bring about a bright new golden dawn. We have the technology. We have software that can directly affect physical nature, tools that earlier, less enlightened ages called magic. But it takes enormous computing power to make use of this—not millions or even billions of processors, but trillions and quadrillions, working in parallel to open a wormhole in space that will reach out to the greater power we serve and awaken it to lead us. We need factories that don’t exist yet, high-vacuum beam lines in orbit building billions of advanced microprocessors using rare earth elements extracted from the lunar regolith using mining technologies that don’t exist yet.
“And we need it now, in the next three years. Undead alien nightmares are awakening from aeons-long hibernation. Their ambassadors are already at work, spreading darkness around the world. Our old allies are turning their faces against us, lost in the gathering storm. Our new allies are weak and unreliable and mean us ill. We need a new kind of arsenal if we are to defend democracy and freedom, and the first step in rebuilding our defenses is to build a hypercomputing cloud in solar orbit, one powerful enough to summon the Lord of Sleep to lead us…”
Ira shakes his head. Hot prickling sweat dots his spine, but he can’t summon the willpower to stand. He means to block out the soporific droning narrative of the speaker and walk out of the overheated briefing, but somehow he can’t quite work out how to move his arms and legs any more. And he is still in his seat when the speaker pauses for breath—their first pause in nearly five minutes—and taps a key on the laptop to start the PowerPoint presentation.
Then Ira is out of time for good, as the Black Chamber’s geas works its way into his soul and binds him to serve the Common Cause.
* * *
A mirror-walled office building in Maryland, formerly the exclusive home of the National Security Agency, plays host to a very different agency these days. Three upper floors of the NSA’s headquarters building in Fort Meade, Maryland, have been donated to another agency, the OPA, during its ongoing rapid expansion.
The Operational Phenomenology Agency, known to its friends as the Black Chamber and to its detractors and rivals as the Nazgûl, sprang from the same roots as the original NSA: wartime codebreakers and builders of computers and listening posts. But the OPA serves other objectives. It’s not a passive intelligence-gathering agency. Rather, it was established to bring the spectral weight of America’s occult intent to bear on all threats, both internal and external. Here are the hex-casters, the shadow wreakers and night haunts. Here dwell the senders of nightmares and the breakers of rebel souls. Their mathemagical scryers and experts in algorithmic arcana have privileged access to the NSA’s server farms, which were designed from the outset with dual use in mind. The chained monsters they summon are all bound by the OPA, forced to serve the agency. And the agency is itself subject to the iron bonds of a geas encoded in a steel sigil buried beneath the Supreme Court.
On the same morning that the OPA’s speaker weaves a spell of obedience over an assembly of executives, a very small committee meets in a windowless room next door to the Deputy Director’s temporary office. There are permanent isolation grids inscribed on the floor, ceiling, and walls—all currently energized—but no black candles drip wax on skulls adorning the Chair’s ebon throne, nor do silver zentai-clad blood guards stand motionless in the corners of the room, guarding the witch-queen and her generals. It’s almost ostentatiously plain, furnished with General Services Administration tables and chairs. The occupants show no outward signs of the huge occult power under their control.
“Today’s updates, General Miller?”
General Miller—a lean, fiftyish fellow—leans forward and bows his head over his blotter. “Oligarch is giving me cause for concern,” he says thoughtfully. “There’s the ongoing lack of progress with Threshold, but that’s nothing new, and the longer it continues, the less scope there is for disruption. Everything else is ticking along. But Oligarch—”
The Deputy Director clears her throat. “Remind me which one Oligarch is? Is it Japan? Or—”
“Great Britain, ma’am.”
“Ah, yes.” A frown of disapproval mars her office-blonde visage. “Quite a royal mess.”
Miller nods. “The traitors in the Comstock Office did a number on us, I’m afraid, and the New Management over there isn’t inclined to let things slide. We’ve been trying to reestablish traction but everything we set up gets shut down fast. The Brits are professionals. Also, they’ve got their hands in our pockets about as deep as we’ve got ours into theirs. It’s as bad as going up against the Israelis.”
“Spare me the tedious metaphors. What is happening now?”
“An uptick in chatter, ma’am.” General Miller glances across the table. “Dr. Garrett has the details.” Dr. Garrett, a civilian advisor, frowns and looks attentive, but Miller passes over him and ploughs on lugubriously. “It looks like the New Management is reviving their Special Operations Executive. Not the postwar OCCINT side of the organization, but the original wartime agency, the British equivalent of the OSS”—ancestor to the CIA, an active sabotage agency that raised hell during the Second World War—“and it’s under the personal control of the PM. They’re putting Q-Division personnel in all the key positions. In conjunction with the changes to their military threat stance, it looks as if they’re rapidly elevating their nonconventional war-fighting capability, and they’ve got those Middle Earth geeks to draw on as cadre. I can’t speak to their goals, but it looks very bad from here.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” someone is heard to mutter in the sudden silence.
“How effective are the overtures we’ve tried since X-day? Technical exploits? Capitative replacement? Lester?”
Lester—Colonel Lester Burns, another department lead—shakes his head. “We’ve given up trying to engineer an in-office replacement, ma’am. It’s proven impossible to obtain contractors of the required caliber.”
“By contractors you mean freelance assassins, yes?”
“Your term for them, ma’am. Given that the PM is not in fact human, I’d hesitate to use the term—”
“Theicides, then.” The Deputy Director smiles briefly. It’s a fey lightning flicker of an expression, as if the tissues of her face have briefly become transparent, to reveal a glimpse of the chromed steel armature they normally conceal. Her smile fades, returning to flesh: “What is the nature of the retention problem?”
Burns gives up all attempt at circumlocution. “The last two ended up dead, ma’am. It’s as bad as Castro in the ’60s: once word gets out, we end up only able to recruit the desperate or the incompetent. Our first candidate attempted a close-in kill—the Brits keep laughably light overwatch on their high-value assets—so she succeeded in penetrating his personal protection detail. But when she tried to make her move he, uh, he skeletonized her. Our second candidate circumvented security at the Palace of Westminster and assembled a sniper station
on the Elizabeth Tower. Or at least, he reported he’d circumvented security. They replaced his ammunition with inert cartridges and arrested him when he tried to take the shot. They’re holding treason trials in camera these days and handing down a lot of death sentences—they’ve got vampires to feed, like us—so if we’re lucky they won’t notice how flimsy his back story is…”
“I see.”
“Both times it looks like they had advance warning, ma’am. Or their PM has short-duration precognition. Anyway, I upped the prize money another thousand bitcoin—as high as I could go on my own signing cognizance—but got no takers who passed our first-stage screening. I guess if you want a job done properly you’ve got to do it yourself.”
“Let’s not go there just yet, Colonel.” The Deputy Director frowns mildly. “We’re not at war with them—not officially, anyway—and we don’t assassinate foreign heads of government we’re not actually at war with. Usually.” She flips a page in her agenda. “So we’ve been kicking his shins and he’s pulling on the boots to kick back, is that where you’re telling me we stand with Oligarch?”
“Pretty much that, ma’am. We’re in tit-for-tat territory, iterated game-theory strategies.”
“So what comes next”—the Deputy gazes into the middle distance—“is they’ll make a move on us. A warning nudge. The PM’s vanity will compel him to send us a message. Won’t it?” She stares at General Miller and slowly smiles. It is not a friendly expression.
“That seems likely, ma’am.”
“Good.” A small nod. “Get your tiger team to generate a list of likely secondary targets and we’ll burn down them at tomorrow’s meeting, but for now I want you to focus on Threshold. The former resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is their obvious target—that, and maybe disrupting the next Great Awakening. Anyway, let’s aim to mousetrap the British agents when they arrive, shall we? Turnabout is fair play. Meanwhile, I need to give my opposite number a call. Make nice, convince them we’re de-escalating.”
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