The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  Whoever sampled him while we were on the train—over an hour ago, now—must know they got someone, but there were plenty of other people at the restaurant. They’ll be working through the blood samples, trying to figure out which one belongs to the enemy. Probably stashing the rest as power-ups for later. If we’re lucky, there’ll be a layer of oversight so they can’t simply drain everyone instantly. But they could decide to end Jim at any time—this minute, an hour hence, maybe tomorrow—and if he’s not completely isolated from all thaumaturgic resonance, the first sign will be when he strokes out. If he’s shielded, they may figure he’s already gone. Or make a note to try later. Whatever: it broadens our options slightly.

  Two minutes later Janice pushes a button and Jim, along with the inner ring of cabling, silently vanishes from sight inside a dome of utter blackness. “How much air does that thing hold?” Derek asks. “Assuming time continues to pass inside it?”

  “About”—Janice scowls fiercely—“we need to drop the grid and ventilate at least once every three hours, to be on the safe side. Say, for ten minutes at a time. Let’s check in an hour and see what he thinks.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I did a SCUBA course once. I’m not an expert, but air consumption is one of the basics.”

  So once again Janice proves that not only is she a nerd, she’s a useful nerd who gets to stay on the team. Yay, Janice, have a gold star. I turn my back and breathe a sigh of relief, then go sit down. There is a solution to Jim’s situation, as it happens, but it’s not a pleasant one. I’ve got a couple of hours to figure out the best lever to use to convince Jim that he wants to open door number two: weepy violin over Sally’s impending orphanhood might do it, but it’s a bit unsubtle—

  Sometimes I hate my better instincts.

  * * *

  It’s not the way the man stands in the middle of the road with his hands outstretched that convinces Gaby. It’s that the first words out of his mouth are: “Do you need a ride back into town? Are you hurt? Is there anything I can do to help?” Spoken in a painfully polite British accent.

  Open arms, no obvious weapons, and he’s asking if she needs help. He’s not one of the Men in Black, and if he’s one of the crazies from the Lord of Sleep, then they’ve gone international. But he knows, or somehow guesses, that she’s here and needs help. Gaby doesn’t have a lot of trust right now. Her heart is pounding, and her hands and the small of her back are clammy. “Stay back!” she shouts. “I have a gun!” It’s a stupid bluff, she realizes immediately: it’ll be obvious as soon as he realizes her wrists are zip-tied behind her.

  The man in the road slowly lowers his arms and puts his hands inside his jacket pockets. “No you don’t, and neither do I.” His voice manages to blend patience with sincerity. If it’s a bluff, it’s a better one than hers. “The men you escaped from won’t be shooting anyone else. Do you need help?”

  A second, shorter figure walks towards him from the lakeshore, backlit by headlights. Gaby squints into the glare and realizes it’s a woman. Beyond any rational consideration, this is what finally convinces her that the strangers are safe. “Who are you?” she asks, stepping out from behind her tree but staying tense, ready to bolt at the slightest hint of trouble.

  “We heard you on the radio,” the man begins as the woman steps up beside him, arms akimbo, and interrupts: “Opener of Doors.” She, too, has a foreign accent, but on top of that there’s something else wrong, some sort of speech impediment. She bows elaborately, flourishing her hands as she does.

  “Not now, Jon,” the man tells her, in a tone of mild exasperation.

  “Opener of Doors!” Jon is quite insistent.

  “Sorry.” The man faces Gaby. “I’m Pete, this is Jon, she’s on the spectrum, please make allowances. Our friend back at the lakeside is Brains.”

  “Doors!” Jon is practically bouncing up and down with frustration. “Doorsdoorsdoors!”

  “I think Jon is saying she’d like to visit your studio. Jon, we need to talk about other things first. Uh, Ms. Carson, do you know what happened to your colleagues?”

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god.” Gaby cringes as realization cascades down on her in an icy deluge. “The Men in Black arrested us, they killed Glenn and hurt Danni—”

  A distant shout from the shoreline. “Hey! Stop arseing about, I need help here!”

  Pete shrugs apologetically, then turns and walks back towards the lake. After a moment of indecision, Gaby stumbles after him, unbalanced by her bound arms. Jon stands in the road, shoulders rounded and head bowed, muttering under her breath, then she turns and trots after them.

  Gaby stumbles to a stop on the lakeshore. Two big SUVs face each other, the newcomers’ and the one she escaped from. The latter is flanked by two fitfully smoking fires, indistinct objects smoldering on the muddy ground behind open doors. A smell of charred pork hangs heavy on the night air and her gorge rises. Pete, who she now sees has shoulder-length hair in a ponytail, bends over, gasping, and that’s the last trigger she needs for her stomach to rebel.

  “This one’s breathing but the guy in the boot is—” She barely hears the shouter, Brains. She staggers, unbalanced by her bound arms, but someone—Jon?—supports her and shoves her hair out of the way. As she stands doubled-over, subsiding into dry heaves, she feels someone sawing at the zip ties. A moment later her wrists come free and she wipes her eyes, then rubs her wrists.

  “Mm, I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” Jon intones flatly, then giggles.

  Gaby has a shocked impulse to slap the other woman—then recalls Pete’s advice. On the spectrum? Right. Inappropriate outbursts—are they part of it, or is she just an asshole? Or is something else up with her? Gaby finishes throwing up. “Water,” she gasps. Someone thrusts a plastic bottle at her, which she accepts gratefully. It takes her a moment to register it’s Jon. She rinses and spits, then hands the bottle back as she straightens up. Determinedly avoiding looking at the charred husks, she staggers in a wide circle around the SUV and back towards the open tailgate, where a bald, middle-aged guy with a beard is shining a flashlight inside. Something drips on the mud below, black in the shadows.

  “Fuck,” she spits.

  “They shot him.” Bald guy—Brains—looks at her with hollow eyes. “I’m sorry.” He steps aside. “Your friend—”

  A groan from the cab sets Gaby scrambling. She barks her knee on the edge of the door. “Oww. Danni!”

  Danni lies lengthwise along the bench seat. Brains has cut the zip ties and rolled her into the recovery position but she’s still unconscious. “I’m really worried, she needs medical attention. Where’s the nearest clinic?”

  A shudder of relief turns Gaby’s knees to jelly. Is there anything we can do to help? Pete had asked. “Back through town to the highway, then—” She judders to a halt. “No, can’t get an ambulance down here fast enough, be quicker to drive her ourselves—”

  Pete materializes behind her. “Tell you what,” he says, “how about we drive you and your friend back to WOCZ-FM? You can borrow my phone and call an ambulance to meet you there while we’re on the way. We’re foreign tourists,” he adds apologetically. “You know what number to ring, right?”

  “That’d be great!” She takes a deep breath. “But this—”

  “We’ll have to move her,” he says calmly. “Brains, if you can take her legs? Ms. Carson, you can ride beside her, with Jon on the other side, if you can keep her upright and try not to jar her head—I think she’s got a bad concussion? We’ll take you back to your studio—”

  “Thank you, thank you!”

  The good Samaritans ease Danni into the back of their vehicle. Jon mumbles under her breath in a foreign language that sounds like a demon swearing, but they’re helping, Gaby realizes gratefully, and leaves the thinking to her rescuers. She’s had a nasty shock, and if they want to help she should be grateful and let them. “Jon was looking forward to seeing your studio,” Pete tells her as Brains turns the
SUV around. “Would you mind showing her around while we wait for the ambulance?”

  “Oh, there’s not a lot to see—” Gaby demurs, but Pete hands her his phone, unlocked, and then she’s busy phoning in a 911 call and holding Danni steady while Brains drives. And so what if they’ve got the WOCZ-FM studio loaded in their GPS, and Jon’s eyes glow faintly as she chants? These are good people and they want to help her, and the smoking bodies on the beach will still be dead in the morning.

  * * *

  Sam was riding shotgun in the anonymous sedan—not one of the Secret Service’s fleet of presidential transports, but a black rental Lincoln from Hertz—when the phone in the President’s pocket rang. They were stuck in traffic near Dupont Circle. His shoulder blades tensed.

  “Don’t answer that—” Mattingley began, a fraction of a second too late.

  “This is Arthur.” The President, in polo shirt and Ralph Lauren shades, managed to look both relaxed and pissed off simultaneously. “Who is it?”

  Senior Officer Mattingley frantically mimed something at him. After a moment the President blinked, then thumbed his Blackberry onto speakerphone. “You’ll have to say that again, I didn’t quite catch it.”

  The President, for all that he is charming, charismatic, erudite on the most surprising topics, politically astute, and plays a mean round of golf, can sometimes be a bit naive about security. Sam had seldom been as terrified as he was at that moment, stuck in sluggish traffic feet away from a radio-emitting device identifying the highest of high-value targets in the middle of a decapitation strike. Previous POTUSes weren’t allowed mobile phones at all. This one only got his secure, locked-down Blackberry thanks to vehement insistence and the personal connivance of the director of the NSA, whom he had appointed—

  “Good afternoon, Mister President.” The speaker’s voice was female, self-assured. “I am the Deputy Director of the Operational Phenomenology Agency, our nation’s primary magical defense force. I’d like to apologize for being so slow to reach out to you. As you can imagine, we’ve been in crisis mode today, trying to get a handle on the situation.”

  Something was wrong with this picture, Sam realized. Very wrong. Not that he doubted for a moment that the Deputy Director was the real deal, or suspected her of being a hoax caller who had somehow got hold of the President’s personal phone number and managed to avoid succumbing to the creeping amnesia blanketing the nation. But there was a protocol for heads of agencies to use when reporting to the chief executive, and the caller wasn’t following it. Judging by the faces he glimpsed in his peripheral vision during his scan, Sam figured that both Mattingley and the President himself were also alert to this. The President, in particular, wore the same fixed grin that Sam had occasionally seen on the face of a prosecuting attorney closing in for the kill.

  “What exactly is the nature of the situation, and why am I hearing this over a direct voice call rather than through regular channels? Why are you, a Deputy Director, calling me, rather than the head of your agency? And after a six-hour window during which all our normal continuity of government operations appear to have fallen by the wayside?”

  There was a dry chuckle. “Ah, sir, what an interesting question.” The Deputy Director paused. “I am calling on your voice line because your absence from the executive residence has not gone unnoticed. It may make it harder for us to ensure your safety.”

  Mattingley and the President exchanged glances. “I don’t recall seeing your organization listed in the daily briefings. Or reporting any current threat profiles. Again: Who are you, and what’s going on?”

  Their driver spotted a gap in the traffic and gunned the limo towards it. Horns blared for a few seconds.

  “You really should reconsider, sir. If you return to the White House at once we can lock down the perimeter and make sure no threats can reach you.”

  Sam mouthed an obscenity. Mattingley mimed hanging up, but the President was clearly out for blood.

  “I’m not yours to command, ma’am, whoever you really are. I’m your Commander-in-Chief, in case you’ve forgotten, and if you’re truly part of our nation’s civil service then you’ll know that there’s a chain of command and I’m above you on the org chart. What is going on, why is nobody answering my calls, and what the hell is this?”

  “What this is is an emergency, sir.” Sam boggled: The Deputy Director thought she could scold the President? “The Operational Phenomenology Agency deals with occult threats. Magic, for want of a better word. It’s real, an applied science or sciences in its own right, and the nation is currently facing an existential threat. Hence this action. Now, please will you return to the White House? I cannot vouch for your safety otherwise.”

  Sirens rose in the distance, distinctly audible through the sealed windows.

  “I don’t like your attitude,” Arthur sniped, his control momentarily slipping. “You aren’t answering my questions, you’re making demands, and you’re verging on insubordination. So let me make this an explicit order: tell me what the hell is going on. Why has everybody forgotten the Executive Branch?”

  “I don’t take orders from you, sir. Let me make this plain: the President does not rule, the President leads, within the framework defined by the Constitution. There is a difference. The nation is confronting a situation that is not only unprecedented in our experience, but potentially devastating. There was no time to bring you up to speed on the matter, and uninformed meddling would inevitably make matters worse, so in accordance with our operational guidelines we have enacted a binding geas, a magical compulsion if you like, upon the entire nation, to disregard your existence. Without the support of hundreds of thousands of civil servants and millions of soldiers you can’t fuck things up, and we can do our job without human politicians jogging our elbow out of ignorance. Now, I need you to return to the White House immediately. I’ll have further instructions for you once you’re there, but for the time being I just need you to sit tight—”

  More sirens, rising. Their driver yanked the wheel sharply left, then hauled the Lincoln into a hard turn onto a one-way street, going against the traffic flow. He swerved around an oncoming bus and braked to avoid a delivery van, but his passengers paid no attention.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Mr. President, we are your Deep State: we take our orders from a higher authority. My instructions are to assume direct control of the federal government, so I’m giving you one last chance: you must immediately return to the White House, or—”

  Arthur wound down his door window and hurled his Blackberry in front of an oncoming dump truck. A moment later their driver pulled a sharp right turn, narrowly avoided sideswiping a pickup, and accelerated again. As the President closed the window he looked Mattingley in the eye. “Think they were tracing us?” he asked.

  “With a Stingray, who the hell knows? You did the right thing, sir, for what it’s worth.”

  “I wish.” The President closed his eyes, momentarily looking a decade older, then opened them again. “Well, I think that cleared things up nicely, don’t you?”

  “Yessir. Jesus. A magical coup. Deep State bullshit.” Mattingley frowned. “Who do they think they are, the CIA in 1974?”

  “I don’t know.” The President’s expression hardened. “But I know this much: if I go back, they win. And I can’t let that happen.”

  * * *

  Two weeks prior to mission start:

  “Tell me, Baroness, have you ever met one of the Nazgûl?” asked the Senior Auditor.

  I tried not to pull a face as I sipped at my teacup while I perched primly on the edge of the carnivorous sofa. The SA’s office resembles the private den of an endearingly eccentric English public school headmaster from the 1950s, rather than the headquarters of one of the most powerful sorcerers in Europe. In addition to the saggy sofa, it’s furnished with a wooden banker’s chair, a battered leather-topped desk, cast-off mismatched side-tables and bookcases, and dusty curtain drapes t
hat cover the bay windows. Which I am informed overlook a landscape not of this world, and the office as a whole is too large to fit inside its allocated space on the building floor plans: but that’s all par for the course, and at least I’m in no danger of being accidentally fried by a stray sunbeam.

  “Can’t say I have,” I admitted. “Not unless you count Ramona.”

  “You only met her after she slipped their leash: she doesn’t count.” Dr. Armstrong gave me a fey smile as I sipped my tea. (There is an International Standards Organization specification for brewing tea—ISO 3103, based on British Standards Institution BS 6008—but the SA violates it egregiously, every time, by using roughly triple the prescribed quantity of loose-leaf Assam, resulting in a bold and somewhat bitter brew.) “It’s all for the best that they don’t know you any more than you know them. It doesn’t do to become predictable in this game.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Explain. What should I be alert to?”

  “Their organizational traditions and outlook,” he stated crisply, suddenly so businesslike that I jerked and barely avoided spilling my tea. “Surprised?” He raised an eyebrow at me.

  Keeping my face carefully frozen, I put my cup down on the occasional table. “Do tell.”

  “An organization’s internal culture channels the way its agents attempt to discharge their duties, how they perceive their mission,” said the SA. “You’ve spent most of your working life in just three or four large organizations: the police, a multinational investment bank, the Laundry. Oh, and a couple of universities and the House of Lords, but they don’t count because they’re research roles, very academic.” (I personally wouldn’t describe the House of Lords as a research posting, but I suppose the committee processes do a lot of analysis work on the effects of draft legislation, so…) “But consider. Banking is all about risk management. The Laundry was about a different kind of risk management. The police don’t work that way, they’re about risk suppression, and clean-up afterwards, but it’s still risk-centric.” He grinned. “What is the Black Chamber about?”