The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  Pete slumps down in his seat, trying to hide in the legwell. He can’t see for headlight dazzle. An emerald speckled glare from the back seat reflects off the satnav screen and the mirror as Jon sings an eerie singsong ditty in a language not meant for a human throat. His ward heats up alarmingly. Brains’s thaum analyzer bleeps a syncopated commentary, and then two flares light up the night to either side of the parked SUV, as the shooters sheltering behind its doors ignite and burn like human torches.

  Pete looks round, blinking. Jon beams manically at him, her hair standing on end. Perfect dentistry sparkles in the reflected light of the burning cultists. “Fun-fun!” she giggles, her eyes glowing with the wild and inhuman joy of mana unleashed.

  Brains stops the car and climbs down. “Careful—” Pete begins.

  “Checking for survivors,” Brains says tersely.

  “Back there—” Pete turns to look back the way they came.

  “I’ve got this.” Brains approaches the parked SUV, its open doors, and the two blackened bodies burning on the banks of the lake to either side of it. “Two down, body in the back seat, cuffed … checking the boot. Another body. Fuck.”

  Pete stops beside the open rear window of the Escalade. “Did you know this was going to happen?” he asks Jon, keeping his tone as gentle and even as possible, even though he wants to scream.

  “Not be shooting!” she says, and giggles. It takes him a moment to realize that it’s shock on her part, not satanic amusement. “Wasn’t sure I could do that. Look with both eyes, and”—she taps the end of her nose—“see double, see zero, be the basilisk you want to be? Walking death Barbie!” She giggles some more, then starts free-associating random nonsense names for her new-found ability to kill with a hard stare. Tears slowly trickle down her cheeks: whether they’re the joy of the damned or the damnation of joy, Pete can’t tell.

  Pete suppresses a shudder, swallows, and looks back up the road. “I saw someone back there and I’m going to investigate. Come along. But don’t do that again unless they attack us first, please.”

  * * *

  In normal circumstances, the President of the United States is one of the most heavily guarded individuals on Earth. Although notionally just another elected politician, the POTUS is surrounded by trappings befitting the King-Emperor of a planetary power—a presidential palace, pomp and ceremony, jet planes and escorts and bodyguards. Protecting them is one of the main missions of the US Secret Service. On foreign trips their retinue numbers in the hundreds and the President travels in an armored car only cosmetically distinguishable from a tank.

  But current circumstances are anything but normal, which is why Senior Officer Mattingley and his team are tense and constantly fighting exhaustion. There are fewer than a dozen of them, trying to do the job of an entire battalion—and furthermore, Mattingley has to assume that everything he knows about procedures for organizing presidential security is known to the adversary stalking them.

  It’s been downhill ever since the morning three-plus months ago when America forgot the President.

  Sam is part of Matt’s team because of happenstance: he was one of the officers on the graveyard shift the day everything went wrong. The White House and the Executive Office Building operate around the clock, but many of the desks are only fully staffed half the time. (Notionally they’re only staffed during office hours, but presidential teams attract workaholics.) The big man himself usually sleeps for at least four hours a night. While much of the White House security detail is uniformed branch, two special officers are on hand at all hours, in case the First Lady gets a hankering for Dunkin’ Donuts, or the President gets a bad case of insomnia and decides to work out. It’s not all about body-slamming crazed assassins to the ground and being able to provide mouth-to-mouth in an emergency: part of it is about knowing which kitchen drawer they keep the corkscrews in.

  So Sam just happened to be sitting in the ready room at about five o’clock that morning, wrapping his mouth around a mug of coffee in an attempt to stay awake, when he felt a strange tingling up and down his spine (as if an army of ants were marching across his future grave) and the bracelet-charm-ward-thing he’d been told to wear two months earlier heated up suddenly, causing him to spill his coffee and swear.

  The wards were a new development. The armory began handing them out three months earlier, along with dire injunctions to wear them at all times while on duty. Sam didn’t believe a word of it at the time. Occult, paranormal crap was not a recognized threat to the President. But odd bits of news had been filtering in. Monster attacks in Japan, a rash of weirdness in Europe, the entire British government going nuts. It was all a bit like email security in 2012; you don’t know much about it but you can’t ignore it any more because it’s leaking like crazy in all directions and, who knows, maybe the Russians have something to do with it? So, when the order to start wearing these bracelets and necklaces came in, his response was, better safe than sorry. Sam didn’t get to be a Special Officer assigned to the White House by cutting corners and disregarding security-related orders.

  “Did you just feel something?” he asked Officer Cho. “Did your ward heat up just now?”

  Dan shook his head. “Not that I noticed.” But he rolled back his shirt cuff all the same, to check: “No, feels normal to me.” He shuddered violently. “Spiders on the back of my neck—”

  “Nope, I don’t see no spiders here.”

  “I’ll just go check the suite anyway.” Cho rose and headed for the passage leading to the master suite, where the President and First Lady were—hopefully—sound asleep. Sam shook his head and checked the alarm panel and camera feeds once more. Nothing seemed to be wrong, and indeed, he didn’t realize anything was truly wrong for another four hours, when it became clear that nobody was turning up to relieve the night shift that morning.

  At six o’clock, OSCAR was up and at the gym; six thirty and FLORENCE, the First Lady, was also awake and active. But none of the morning-shift domestic staff had checked in. Sam swore quietly and got a fresh batch of coffee going. At seven, his and Dan’s relief officers were overdue. So were the first early-bird staffers. Something was wrong. “Tell me we haven’t all missed a public holiday by accident?” he complained.

  “Let me call in.” Two minutes later Dan was even more baffled. “The office say they’ve never heard of us!” He hung up hard. “I’m escalating.”

  “Let’s ask Matt,” Sam suggested. Mattingley, in the security office on the ground floor, ought to have some idea what was going on.

  Over the next hour things got weirder and weirder. Nobody turned up for work—not regular employees, not political staff, not even their Secret Service relief team. All of the night staff were baffled and irritated, but stayed at their posts, waiting. Mattingley sent Cho, Penrose, and two other officers to check the Executive Office Building. That, too, was deserted: lights out, night shift hanging on for their relief, nobody coming in. By eight o’clock Sam and the others were back at the house itself, reporting to Mattingley. “Catch an eyeful of this,” Matt told them, pointing at one of the TV screens in the senior officer’s room. It was the morning briefing on C-SPAN, a round-up of the news. “What’s missing?” he demanded.

  Cho swallowed. “Are we missing, sir?” he asked after a minute.

  “OSCAR clued me in and I’ve been keeping an eye on this for half an hour,” said Mattingley. “You’re right. C-SPAN should be all over today’s trade talks and the commerce bill in the house. But they’re not. It’s all crap about committee hearings, even on the news crawl. It’s like they’ve forgotten the White House exists. And,” he added, “he says nobody’s returning his calls.”

  “This is crazy!” Sam opined.

  “You think so?” Mattingley fixed him with a reptilian stare. “Go to the front door and tell me where all the tourists have gone.”

  That morning got progressively stranger. Mattingley sent a couple of the domestic staff and one switchboard operator home, with orders
to phone him and report what they found. Which was that everything seemed normal, except when they asked children, spouses, and a tourist guide about the President they got nothing but blank stares. After an hour of fruitlessly working the telephone tree, Mattingley went off-site himself with Murph and one other officer. He personally briefed an increasingly irritated and confused OSCAR, swearing him to stay under lockdown, and left Dan and Sam on close protection duty. Under normal circumstances it would have been reckless dereliction of duty—but it was glaringly obvious that these were not normal circumstances.

  They called in Marine One to pick up the President, but the Executive Flight Detachment at Anacostia-Bolling weren’t taking calls. The White House Military Office wasn’t picking up the phone. Neither was State. Nor were anybody else. They’d called for STAGECOACH, but the Secret Service garage where the presidential state car was parked didn’t answer. OSCAR even checked the hotline to the nuclear response center. It was disconnected. Matt walked out through the staff entrance and hailed a taxi to the HQ building on H Street, where he discovered a huge reorg in progress.

  “We’ve been reassigned to counterfeiting,” he announced when they gathered in the Ready Room at ten thirty for take-out pizza that he and Murph had the foresight to collect on the way back. “Investigating Ruritanian card-skimming gangs.”

  “Pomeranian,” Murph corrected around a mouthful of Hawaiian.

  “Whatever.” Mattingley shook his head. “Sir, what do you want us to do?”

  The President’s shrug telegraphed eloquent bafflement. “I have no … idea,” he said slowly, “but can you tell me that this definitely isn’t some sort of attack?”

  The word hung in the air like a live grenade. “Sir, it’s no kind of attack we’ve ever planned for, that’s for sure. If it’s deliberate, it’d take some kind of—”

  “—Occult power,” the President interrupted. “Something powerful enough to make everyone forget we even exist.”

  Mattingley was already on his feet. “I can’t tell you that for definite, sir, but if it’s true we need to move you and FLORENCE to safe locations immediately. Our normal channels are all fubar’d because everyone who wasn’t wearing a ward or inside the White House overnight has forgotten—”

  “Then improvise,” said the President, with the twinkling smile that had won him his Academy Awards before he went into politics. “See if you can remind people, pull in more officers, get an improvised team rolling. If it’s an occult attack, we’ve got to have some sort of agency for countering that, haven’t we? Let’s see what communications can find, what they can do for us. Then we can wake the nation and work out where the attack is coming from. If it is an attack.”

  “Let’s move, people.”

  The morning became a blur of activity. Mattingley sent out officers to pick up all the wards they could find in the armory at HQ. To bring in a very confused consultant on thaumaturgic threats who only remembered the President when they dragged her into the Oval Office to meet OSCAR face-to-face. To round up vehicles, to wake up all the regular White House personal protection officers they could find and haul them in, by physical force if necessary. And to prepare a series of anonymous short-term Airbnb rentals on the fringes of DC for fleeting overnight visits. Around noon they confirmed the sleep/attack hypothesis, when Cho took a catnap and, on awakening, became confused. The temporary staff magic expert was set to work calling colleagues, to start up an emergency countermeasures team. Not long thereafter, the first improvised field team moved out. By that point, all the Secret Service officers were just about jumping out of their skin at the least noise. Something was very wrong, and everyone was waiting for another shoe to drop. A normal attack would have been accompanied by saturation media coverage, frenetic activity, and probably a list of demands. This complete absence of chatter was deeply unnerving. How did you respond to a deafening silence, shouting into a void where nobody could even remember why they ought to be listening to you?

  Then, at one o’clock, the President’s Blackberry rang.

  * * *

  Jim is still weak and a bit shaky when our train pulls into Union Station, but he says he can walk. So I get a cab to drop us a few blocks away from Janice and Derek’s safe house, and try not to freak out every time Jim stumbles on a crack in the pavement. Not that I have any idea what to do if he keels over on me. Local medical services won’t be able to help. We’ve got travel insurance for medical expenses—part of our cover—but the thought of abandoning him in a foreign hospital scares the crap out of me. Not to mention that he’s a big chunk of one of the critical paths for this operation. Jim is not only our tank: he’s my rock.

  See, the PM didn’t give me much time to set this operation up, so I’m copying someone else’s game plan, with suitable modifications. When you copy, always copy the best. So I’m stealing a leaf from Mossad’s playbook: specifically, the page that describes how they assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, co-founder of Hamas’s military wing, in a Dubai hotel room five years ago. Clean-face agents can operate with impunity despite intensive CCTV monitoring and security because they’re on clean passports. They had the luxury of using forgeries—biometrics are ubiquitous today, but first-time-out agents have no suspicious history. The team entered via multiple ports of entry, working in small cells that converged just in time to do the job, then evacuated before the body was found.

  Not that we’re planning on assassinating someone. (At least, not this time.)

  It’s a little after dark when I get to the bland front door and lean on the doorbell. Jim stands behind me, legs braced apart, shoulders slightly slumped. He resembles a cut-price Frankenstein’s monster. The door opens: “Trick or treat?” I chirp, doing a little welcome shimmy to keep in character while Janice gets out of the way. (You never know if the neighbor’s curtains are twitching.) “Get Derek,” I quietly tell her. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Janice looks at me with huge, dark pupils—the hall light’s off—and scoots back inside. I take Jim’s hand and get him inside lest he keel over on the sidewalk.

  Derek ambles gormlessly down the staircase, one shirt tail waving free, just as I’m getting my shoulder under Jim’s armpit and hauling him towards the living area. “What’s the matter—” he begins, then recoils as I snarl at him.

  “Jim’s been bitten!” I raise my voice: “Janice, did you get that grid up?”

  “It’s through here. What—”

  “Dragnet in New York. Hostile PHANGs. We threw them, but Jim got tagged. Can you configure that thing for containment? I want him inside and isolated ASAP.”

  “An isolation grid?” Janice is in the living room with what I mistake at first for an old-school hifi stack, before I recognize that the LEDs on the front panels have nothing to do with audio equipment. A rat king of cheap computing modules, each the size of a Gameboy, forms a loose circle on the floor. “Right here, he’ll need—”

  “Sofa,” Jim mutters, and begins to zombie-shuffle towards the nearest soft furnishing. “I feel like crap,” he rumbles as he collapses onto it. “World’s worst hangover, without the beer to earn it. Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Sit,” I tell him. Derek peers nervously around the front hall archway. “Derek, make yourself useful and get Jim something to drink.” Alcohol won’t hurt right now, may actually reduce his stress level. “The adversary has PHANGs,” I continue, pacing a hole in the carpet. “Watch out for people in silver bodysuits—”

  “Zentai suits?” Derek offers hopefully.

  “Whatever they are—full face and hand covering? Yes? Where did—”

  “They’re all over the Mall and the federal buildings,” he says, confirming another of my fears. “The suits let them go out in daylight.”

  “Well fuck.” Janice pauses. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  I decide not to draw her attention to my own sartorial choices: “Because we don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb.” Deep breath. “Jim, you’re going to sleep inside a
powered-up grid—Janice, you know the geometry Basil used to keep his food fresh? That’ll block the V-parasites temporarily—”

  Jim draws breath. “Now hang on a moment—”

  “—You’re going to live in this grid except when you absolutely have to come out, and we’re going to get you home in one piece—”

  “Wait!” he says, summoning up his police voice. It’s not exactly a shout, but it carries. He looks around at us in the resulting silence. “What?”

  Janice stalks towards him, clutching a wreath of cables. “Jim.” She glances at me. “He’s been bitten?” she asks. I nod. “Jim. PHANG infection. You know the basics?” He nods. “No, I really don’t think you do.” It’s still too abstract: I don’t think he really gets it. So, because she knows I’m too chicken to show him, Janice smiles.

  Back when we contracted this unfortunate condition—that’s as much a euphemism as calling the US Civil War “the late unpleasantness”—Janice was my team’s system administrator and go-to devops person. Alex Schwartz, math PhD and utter flange bucket, rediscovered the dark theorem that installs V-symbionts in the wetware of anyone who studies it, so this is entirely on him. Alex’s special sauce was a really nifty animated infographic that turned PHANG syndrome, from something only dedicated psychopathic sorcerers get after years of study, into a drive-by strain virulent enough to take root in a dumb HR manager—like me. And he excitedly demo’d his discovery to everyone on the team. I try to keep the more florid symptoms of my disease to myself but Janice has rather fewer social inhibitions and an aversion to cosmetic dentistry, so when she smiles she really bares her incisors.

  Jim recoils. “Shit!”

  “I’m a vampire,” she says. “This is me coming out of the closet, no, coffin. It’s not just theoretical, Jim: a vampire has fed on your blood, and what happens next is that their parasites chew on your brain until you die. Unless you get in the fucking grid right now.”

  “Do it,” I tell him. “We can figure the rest out later.” Inasmuch as he has a later. “Grid up or die, Jim.” He moves as if to stand and I’m there in a split second, taking his weight on my shoulders. “Jan, chuck a cushion or something on the floor there. Derek, raid the kitchen, grab any snacks and soft drinks you can find, shove them in. Jim, let’s get you settled. Oh, Derek? He’s going to need a bucket.”