Angleton’s thin smile tells me exactly what he thinks of the world wide web.
“Not exactly. They were just redeployed in support of a higher mission.”
I remember the blue-glowing instrument panel lighting up the hangar from behind canvas screens, and shudder. “What kind of . . . ?”
“They’re part of the contingency planning for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, boy.” He looks momentarily annoyed, as if the impending end of the world as we know it is a minor inconvenience. “Bystanders,” he murmurs: “Whatever will they think of next?”
“The white elephant,” I prompt, but I’m too late.
“Never mind that now, boy, you can go back and look at it later.” He looks at me, concern and irritation wrinkling his face further, and this time he’s actually looking, studying me with those merciless washed-out eyes as if I’m a sample on a dissection tray: “Hmm. If Iris told you to take the rest of the week off, I suppose you ought to do as she says. A bystander, eh? What was a bystander doing there?”
“She was a volunteer at the museum—she was bringing us tea.”
Angleton’s eyes narrow. “Was she indeed?” He picks up a pen and a pad and scrawls a list of numbers on it. “Well, when you feel like getting back to work, you might want to go down to the stacks and retrieve these documents from the dead file store. I think you’ll find them very interesting.” He signs the note and slides it across the table at me. The document references are just catalog numbers identifying files by their shelf location, no actual codewords referring to named projects. Typical of Angleton, to be so elliptical about things. “And I’d like you to deputize for me on the BLOODY BARON committee.”
“Iris is putting me on light administrative duties,” I protest.
Angleton smiles humorlessly. “Then you’ll have something to do when you’re bored,” he says. “Be off with you!”
3.
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE DAYLIGHT
I EMERGE FROM THE STAFF ENTRANCE TO THE C&A ON THE high street, blinking like a groundhog caught in the headlights of an onrushing Hummer.
It is a Wednesday, just before the lunchtime rush, and the pavements are full of shoppers and people with nowhere better to go. A herd of buses rumble past, farting clouds of sulphurous biodiesel and lunging at cyclists. But I am not at work. Something is wrong with the world, something is broken: a wire has come loose in my soul.
I start to walk.
I don’t want to go home just yet: it’s sixty to seventy minutes of riding on two buses, but then I’ll have nothing to do but sit staring at the walls for the rest of the afternoon. If it was a normal summer’s day I could go for a walk on Wandsworth Common—it’s only about a mile or two from here—but the sky is overcast and gray, threatening rain later on. Or I could go into town. Maybe get the tube to Euston and visit the British Library. I’ve got a reader’s card, and there are some interesting manuscripts I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, relevant to the job . . . No, I can hear Iris ticking me off in the back of my head, telling me that’s not what I ought to be doing when I’m on medical leave.
In the end, I walk to the next bus stop just in time to see the tail end of the herd vanishing round the corner, and wait nearly ten minutes for the next bunch of buses to arrive, with only my iPod for company—that, and a couple of students, a pensioner pushing a shopping bag on wheels, and an Uncle Fester type in a dirty trench coat who is pointedly not making eye contact with anyone.
I sit on the top deck for forty minutes as it slowly migrates towards Victoria, then hop off and head for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet for lunch. It’s stowed out, as you can imagine, because I’ve hit peak lunch time; but it makes a welcome change from the dismal little pie shop round the corner from the New Annexe. I emerge into daylight with a full stomach and my sense of well-being marginally restored. It’s trying to rain, lonely drips spattering the pavement and evaporating before they can join up. I shuffle along with the tourists and foreign language students and shirking office workers, staring into shop windows and feeling faintly wistful, something nagging at the back of my mind.
The penny drops. My PDA! Okay, it’s Laundry-issue. But it’s toast! Sure I have a cheap, dumb mobile phone as well, but I relied on that PDA; it had my life embedded in its contacts and calendar. Yes, there’s a backup, but it’s on my office PC, which is most definitely not a laptop and most definitely not allowed to go home with me—the last thing the Laundry needs is headlines like CIVIL SERVANT LOSES LAPTOP: ENTIRE POPULATION OF TOWER HAMLETS EATEN BY GIBBERING HORRORS
FROM BEYOND SPACETIME—so for the time being, I’m adrift. If Mo called me right now I genuinely couldn’t phone Pete and Sandy. Help, it’s a crisis! Well okay, it’s a minor crisis, but I rationalize: obsessing over my lost address book is a lot healthier than obsessing over a blinding purple flash and an imploding face—
Besides, shopping is therapeutic. Right?
I pull out my phone and look at it in distaste. It’s a cheap Motorola jobbie with a pay-as-you-go SIM, and its major virtues are that it’s small and it makes phone calls. I bought it a year and a half ago when word went round that IT Services were threatening to inflict Arseberries on us along with a centralized work directory, and start billing for personal calls. The rumor turned out to be unfounded but I kept the phone (and the PDA I wangled Andy into signing off on) because between them they did a better job than the old Treo, and besides, all smartphones are shit these days. It’s the one industry where progress is going backwards in high gear, because the yakking masses would rather use their phones as car navigation systems and cameras than actually make phone calls or read email.
About the only smartphone that doesn’t stink like goose shit is the JesusPhone. But I’ve steadfastly refused to join the Cult of Jobs ever since I first saw the happy-clappy revival tent launch; it brought back painful memories of a junior management training course the late and unlamented Bridget sent me on a few years ago. Nothing can possibly be that good, even though the specifications look rather nice on paper, right?
You know how this is going to end . . .
I spend an hour shuffling around mobile phone shops, comparing specifications and feeling my brains gently melting, which confirms what I already knew: all mobile phones are shit this year. Then I allow my feet to carry me into the O2 shop and plant me in front of an austerely minimalist display stand where halogen lights play their spotlight beams across the polished fascia of a JesusPhone, a halo of purity gleaming above it.
“Can I help you, sir?” beams one of the sales staff.
“That thing.” My finger points at the JesusPhone as if drawn to it by a powerful geas. “How much?” (That’s the only question that matters, you see: I’ve already memorized its specifications.)
“The 64Gb model, sir? On an eighteen-month contract—”
The JesusPhone, I swear it is smiling at me: Come to me, come to me and be saved. The luscious curves, the polished glissade of the icons in the multi-touch interface—whoever designed that thing is an intuitive illusionist, I realize fuzzily as my fingertip closes in on the screen: That’s at least a class five glamour.
The next thing I think is, I shouldn’t have let myself get so close. But by then I’m on my way out of the store, clutching a carrier bag and a receipt that says I’ve put a dent in my bank balance big enough that Mo’s going to have something new to swear about this month, to the benefit of Apple’s shareholders.
I slink home with my metaphorical tail between my legs, clutching my shiny new JesusPhone like a consolation prize for my lack of a real life.
IT IS 4 P.M., THE COOL RAINS HAVE BROUGHT THEIR GURGLING freight of water to the overflowing gutter above the kitchen window, and I am sitting at the table with a laptop and a freshly jailbroken JesusPhone when the doorbell chimes.
(You didn’t expect me not to jailbreak an iPhone so I can run unsigned applications on it, did you? That would be no fun at all!)
I get up and slouch towards the fron
t porch.
“Surprise party!” It’s a pair of familiar faces. Pinky is holding the umbrella while Brains hefts a pair of beer casks at me.
I take a step back. “Hey, what’s the big deal?”
“Beware of geeks bearing beer.” Pinky cocks his head and looks at me madly as Brains makes a beeline for the kitchen and clears some counter space. “We heard about the whoopsie and figured you might want some company.”
Pinky and Brains: the (ex-)flatmates from heck, if not hell. I used to share a house with them, back in the days when I was still seeing Mhari. They’re a matched couple of geeks, working for Technical Support these days (Gizmos department, Dirty Tricks directorate). Brains does the hardware, Pinky does human factors and delivery flourishes, and both of them do the Pride march around Regent’s Park every summer even though they don’t need to be publicly out to maintain their security clearances these days.
A voice calls from the kitchen, “Hey, who let that thing in here?”
I go back inside hastily. “It’s mine. As of this afternoon.”
“Mine, precioussss.” Brains is bending over my new phone. “Jailbroken it yet? I’ve been doing some evaluation work on these too, they look promising . . .”
“Don’t be silly.” I peer at the beer casks. He’s lined them up next to the sink. “Hey, that’s not nitro pressurized.”
“That’s right; they’re cask-conditioned!” Brains says proudly. “Normally you have to leave them twenty-four hours to drop bright after you tap them, but with this”—he produces a home-brew box of electronics from one waterproof pocket—“you can cut the wait to sixty minutes.”
“What is it?” I pause. “If it’s a temporal multiplexer I’ve got to warn you, last time we had one in here Mo had to beat the fridge contents to death with a cricket bat—she was most annoyed—”
“Nope, it’s ultrasonic.” He switches it on as he plants it on top of the first cask, and I feel my jaw muscles clench. Ultrasonic it may be, but it’s got some low frequency harmonics that remind me unpleasantly of a mosquito the size of a Boeing 737.
“Switch it off, please.”
Pinky is doing something bizarre to the umbrella, turning it inside out through its own center—I do a double take: Is that really a Möbius strip umbrella?—and it vanishes, except for a stubby handle, which he hangs on the inside doorknob. I blink. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Iris said you could do with some company,” Brains says blandly as my phone chirps and does an incoming-text shimmy on the counter. I grab it. It’s a message from Mo: UNAVOIDABLY DETAINED BY WORK, DON’T STAY UP.
I might not be wearing a ward around my neck right now—I didn’t stay in the office long enough to sign out a replacement for the one I toasted yesterday—but it’s not my only defense, and right now my this-is-a-setup gland is pulsing painfully. “This is a put-up job, right? What’s going on?” I glance at the front hall, half-expecting the doorbell to ring again and Boris and Andy to be standing there, along with a briefing on some kind of harebrained operation—
“Don’t be silly, Bob,” Brains says crisply: “Iris just got word that your fragrant wife has been called away to an incident in Amsterdam and she thought someone ought to keep you company today. The saintly Mo should be back tomorrow; until then, we drew the short straw.” He gestures at the beer: “Just like old times, huh?”
“No, it’s not just like old times,” I snort. Then the penny drops: “Job in Amsterdam . . . ?”
“They needed a lead violin.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling very small.
There is this about being married to Mo: every few months she gets called to an unexpected job somewhere in Europe, at short notice, with her violin. A philosopher by academic training and a combat epistemologist by subsequent specialization, she doesn’t talk about what happens on those trips; but I get to hold her shoulders and calm her when she wakes in the pre-dawn gloom, shuddering and clammy. Years ago, shortly after we first met, we got into a situation where I ended up rescuing her from—well, it wasn’t nice, and she overcompensated, I think. The violin’s an Erich Zahn original, refitted with Hilbert-space pickups. There’s a black-on-yellow sticker on its case that says THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS. And sometimes she sits up late into the night, playing music on it that I don’t want to think about.
I pick up my phone and thumb-tap back at her: ENJOY AMSTERDAM AND TAKE CARE XXX. Then I put it down carefully, as if it might explode.
Now I’ve got something to worry about, something to distract me from feeling sorry for myself because of the enquiry, or gnawing over the hollow sense of gnawing wrongness as I see Helen’s face melting away in front of my eyes again and again—something tangibly threatening to be upset about. If anything happens to Mo I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s not as if my parents or elder brother know what I do for a living: they think I’m just a junior civil servant. The same goes for Mo, only more so—her dad’s dead, Mum’s a ditz, and her kid sister’s married to an engineer in Dubai. We’re isolated, but we can confide in each other, do the mutual support thing that so many couples don’t seem to do. We understand each other’s problems. Which means that right now I’m drinking for two.
“In the fridge, top shelf on the left, there’s an open bottle of wine,” I say, standing and making for the cupboard to root out some glasses. “You guys didn’t drive, did you?”
“That would be irresponsible, Bob,” Pinky says soberly. “Is this the right bottle . . . ?”
“Give it here.” I pause for a moment, bottle poised over an inviting glass: “Boris doesn’t have anything to do with this, does he? You’re quite sure it was Iris’s idea?”
“Don’t be silly, Bob,” says Brains, taking the bottle (and the glass).
“Boris is on detached duty with the Dustbin this year. Here, take this. How about a toast? Confusion to the enemy!”
I raise my glass. “What enemy?”
He shrugs: “IT, Human Resources, the grim march of time—whoever you want, really.”
“I’ll drink to that!” says Pinky, and I nod.
It’s going to be a long evening, but it was going to be a long evening anyway and at least this way I don’t get to spend it brooding on my own.
THE NEXT MORNING, I AWAKEN TO FIND THAT MY MOUTH TASTES as if a rat used it for a bed and breakfast, and Mo still isn’t here. I roll over, reaching across her side of the bed. Empty. It’s early but I yawn and sit up, then visit the bathroom to change the rat’s bed linen before stumbling downstairs. The kitchen sink is full of empty bottles, and someone left a JesusPhone on the kitchen table, plugged into my laptop—
Oh. Shit. It wasn’t a dream, then.
I switch the kettle on and run a comb through my hair, wondering if I can take the bloody thing back. I haven’t activated it, have I—oh.
There’s a handwritten note next to it. I read it with a sinking heart: HI BOB HOPE YOU LIKE THE EASTER EGGS BRAINS.
No, I can’t take it back. Not until I find out what Brains did to it. I rack my memories for any hint of details, but it’s all a bit of a blur. I remember him saying something about evaluation work. Jesus, he could have put anything on it. Not that Brains would install classified experimental work-related software on an agent’s personal mobile phone, oh no, but if he thought it had been issued to me by work that would be another matter entirely.
I turn the radio on just as the kettle rises to a rattling, rolling boil and shuts off. I pull the cafetière out of the cupboard and spoon coffee into it, pour water and stare at it, as if that’ll make it brew faster.
It is just occurring to me that today is a Thursday and I am not expected to—no, scratch that, I am expected not to—go into the office today, and I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do with myself. It’s not like a holiday, meticulously planned fun’n’frolics on a beach with Mo, or even a weekend of vegging out in front of the TV at home. It feels more like I’m under house arrest. Sick leave is no fun at all when you’re doing it
on instructions from management.
The radio is blatting on about the news: Prime Minister talking about the need for faith schools, something about a UN Population Fund meeting in the Netherlands, an idiot footballer getting an idiot multimillionpound handshake from an idiot football team . . . all the usual cheerily oblivious rubbish we listen to in order to feel connected. Right now it sounds like it’s bleeding in from another world.
I carefully lower the plunger on the cafetière—it’s balky, and has a tendency to squirt hot coffee grounds everywhere if you don’t do it just right—then pour myself a mug and sit down in front of the JesusPhone. Gosh, that thing’s shiny. Now, what can Brains have done?
It doesn’t take me long to find out: the icon that looks like a tumble drier is a bit of a giveaway, come to think of it. I groan and stab the thing with my thumb, and a whole bunch of new icons show up. What the fuck . . . ? I swear quietly: there’s a lot more to this than just evaluation work. Those of us who do fieldwork have a whole suite of specialized software tools we need to carry about—most of them don’t require any particular hardware, they just need a general-purpose processor that can do some rather unusual number-intensive calculations, and the new phone’s got plenty of grunt in that department. This looks like a first pass at porting the entire Occult Field Countermeasures Utility Trunk to run native on JesusPhone, which means I can forget about returning it to the shop, for starters.
Brains has unintentionally taken a huge stinking shit all over our security frontline, installing classified software on an unapproved and unauthorized device. It was just an obvious misunderstanding and no harm’s come about, and as soon as I can smuggle the phone back into the New Annexe and get him to wipe the fucking thing back to factory condition we can pretend it never happened; but until then, I’m going to have to carry the thing on my person at all times and defend it with my life. Well, that or I can set Operational Oversight on him—but my life doesn’t need the excitement of being the subject of two simultaneous boards of enquiry.
The Fuller Memorandum Page 5