“Ouch.” She leans back in her chair and rests one hand on her computer keyboard. “Listen. If you’re really sure you want an alarm, I’ll sign for one. But . . . what Harry said? Listen to him. It’s not necessarily what you need. The gun—well, you’re certified. Certificated.” She gives a moue of annoyance at the mangled language we have to use: “Whatever. Just keep it out of sight of the public and don’t lose track of it. As for the rest—”
She exhales: “There has been an uptick in meetings in public places conducted by three junior attachés at the Russian embassy who our esteemed colleagues in the Dustbin”—she means the Security Service, popularly but incorrectly known as MI5—“have been keeping track of for some time. It’s hard to be sure just which organization any given diplomat with covert connections is working for, but they initially thought these guys were FSB controllers. However, we’ve had recent indications that they’re actually working for someone else—the Thirteenth Directorate, probably. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, but they seem to be looking for something, or someone.”
“And then there was the Amsterdam business,” I prod.
Another sharp look: “You weren’t cleared for that.”
“Andy procured a Letter of Release for Mo.” I stare right back at her, bluffing. The I’ll tell you my secrets if you tell me yours tap dance is a tedious occupational hazard in this line of work.
“Well, yes, then.” The bluff works—that, and her ward told her I’m telling the truth about the Letter of Release. “Amsterdam, CLUB ZERO, was indirectly connected.”
“So we’ve got an upswing of activity in the Netherlands and the UK—elsewhere in Europe, too?” I speculate: “Remember I’ve sat in on my share of joint liaison meetings?”
“I can’t comment further until after the steering group meeting tomorrow.” And my bluff falls apart: “I’ve told you everything I can tell you without official sanction, Bob. Get your kit sorted out, clear down your chores, and go home for the weekend. That’s an order! I’ll talk to you on Monday. Hopefully the news will be better by then . . .”
5.
LOST IN COMMITTEE
I GO BACK TO HARRY’S PLACE AND COLLECT MY KIT, THEN I catch the bus home, shoulders itching every time it passes a police car. Yes, I’m legally allowed to carry the Glock and its accessories, which are sleeping in my day sac in a combination-locked case. The gun and its charmed holster are supposed to be invisible to anyone who doesn’t carry a Laundry warrant card; but I’ll believe it when I see it. Luckily the bus is not stormed by an armed SO19 unit performing a random check for implausible weapons. I arrive home uneventfully, unpack the gun and place it on the bedroom mantelpiece (which is just to the left of my side of the bed), and go downstairs to sort out supper with Mo.
Friday happens, and then the weekend. I register the JesusPhone: it wants a name, and Mo suggests christening it (if that’s the right word) the NecronomiPod. Her attitude has turned to one of proprietorial interest, if not outright lust: damn it, I am going to have to buy her one.
We do not discuss work at all. We are not doorstepped by zombies, shot at, blown up, or otherwise disturbed, although our next-door neighbor’s teenage son spends a goodly chunk of Saturday evening playing “I Kissed a Girl” so loudly that Mo and I nearly come to blows over the pressing question of how best to respond. I’m arguing for Einstürzende Neubauten delivered over the Speakers of Doom; she’s a proponent of Schoenberg delivered via the Violin that Kills Monsters. In the end we agree on the polite voice of reason delivered via the ears of his parents. I guess we must be growing old.
On Saturday morning, it turns out that we are running low on groceries. “Why not go online and book a delivery from Tesco?” asks Mo. I spend a futile hour struggling with their web server before admitting to myself that my abstruse combination of Firefox plug-ins, security filters, and firewalls (not to mention running on an operating system that the big box retailer’s programmers wouldn’t recognize if it stuck a fork in them) makes this somewhat impractical—by which time we’ve missed the last delivery, so it looks as if we’re going to have to go forth and brave the world on foot. So I cautiously hook the invisi-Glock to my belt for the first time, pull my baggiest jacket down to cover it, and Mo and I hit the road.
Anticlimax. As we trudge home from the supermarket, laden down with carrier bags, I begin to relax slightly: even when my jacket got caught up on the front of a suicide grannie’s shopping trolley, nobody noticed the hardware and started screaming. (This is twenty-first-century England, home of handgun hysteria: they’re not being polite.) “By the way,” Mo comments edgily as we wait to cross a main road, “don’t you think you should be keeping your right hand free?”
I scan the surroundings for feral supernatural wildlife: “If I need my hand the shopping can take its chances.”
“Then don’t you think it’d be better to be carrying the bag with the bread and cheese in that hand, rather than the milk and the jar of pickled cucumbers?”
I swear quietly, try to switch hands, and get the bags inextricably entangled, just as the green man illuminates. We are a cover-free couple for the entire duration of our panicky scurry across the street crossing: “I should have held out for an attack alarm,” I grumble.
“We’ll sort one out on Monday,” Mo says absentmindedly. “Watch the vegetables, dear.”
On Sunday, we’re due to have lunch with my parents, which means catching the tube halfway across London and then rattling way the hell out into suburbia on a commuter line run by a bus company distinguished for their hatred and contempt for rail travelers. I wear the holster, this time keeping my right hand free, and Mo carts her violin case along. Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive. Mo’s face acquires much the same impassive expressiveness as an irritated Komodo dragon when Mum makes the usual fatuous (and thoughtless) comment about wishing for the patter of tiny feet. We are not, perforce, allowed to discuss our work in the presence of civilians, so we are short of conversational munitions with which to retaliate—they still think I work in computer support, and Mo’s some sort of statistician. By the time we make our excuses and leave I’m thinking that maybe I’d better leave the gun behind on future parental visits.
“Did you enjoy the vegetables?” I ask the steaming vortex of silence beside me as we walk back up the street towards the railway station.
“I thought you were going to roast them at one point.”
“Sorry, I’m chicken.”
She sighs. “You don’t need to apologize for your parents, Bob. They’ll get over it eventually.”
“They’re not to know.” I glance back over my shoulder. “We could, you know. There’s still time. If you want.”
“Time to fit in all the heartbreak and pain of raising wee ones so they’re just old enough to appreciate the horror of it all? No thanks.”
We’ve had this conversation before, a few times: revisited the situation for an update. No, the world we work in isn’t a suitable one to inflict on a child you love.
“Besides, you’re not the one who’d have to go through a first pregnancy in your late thirties.”
“Certainly not just to please them.”
We walk back to the station in morose silence, a thirty-something couple out for a Sunday afternoon stroll; nobody watching us needs to know that we’re pissed off, armed, and on the lookout for trouble.
It’s probably a very good thing indeed for the local muggers that they’re still sleeping off their Saturday night hangovers.
MONDAY DAWNS BRIGHT AND HOT AND EARLY, AND I FIND MY SELF waking to the happy knowledge that I can go back to work, and nobody will order me home. I roll over, feel the cooling depression across the mattress—continue my roll and sit up, relieved, on the wrong side of the bed.
Mo’s clearly been up for a while: when I catch up with her in the kitchen she’s
listlessly spooning up a bowl of yogurt and gerbil food. I attend to the cafetière. She’s wearing what I think of as her job-interview suit. “What’s up?” I ask.
“Need to look the part for an off-site.” She frowns. “Do you think this looks businesslike?”
“Very.” She looks like she’s about to foreclose on my mortgage. I spill coffee grounds all over the worktop, finish spooning the brown stuff into the jug, and add boiling water. “What kind of meeting?”
“Got to see a man about a violin. Conservation.”
“Conservation . . . ?”
“They don’t grow on trees, you know.” The frown relaxes: “It’s not something common like a Stradivarius. We’ve got three on inventory, but only twelve were ever made and they’re all unavailable for one reason or another. A couple got bombed during the war, three are unaccounted for—presumed lost during extra-dimensional excursions—and the rest belong to other agencies or collectors we can’t touch. Operational Assets are looking for a supplier who can make more of them, but it’s turning out to be really difficult. Nobody is quite sure of the order in which Zahn applied his bindings; and as for what it’s made of, just owning the necessary supplies probably puts you in breach of the Human Tissues Act of 2004, not to mention a raft of other legislation.”
“Ow.” I look at the battered violin case, propped up in the corner next to the recyclables bin. That’s the trouble with a defense policy based on occult weapons: the sort of folks who make magic swords can rarely be bothered with the BS 5750 quality certification required by government procurement committees. “So what are you doing?”
“Carting my violin across town so an expert can examine it.” She finishes her cereal bowl. “A restorer, very expensive, very exclusive. The cover story is I’m working for one of the big auction houses and we’ve been commissioned to get an estimate of its worth—don’t look at me like that, they do this all the time, for stuff they don’t have any in-house expertise with. I’ve got to go along because our other two violins are booked solid, and I’m not letting this one out of my sight . . .” She eyes the coffeepot. “What are you planning?”
“Got to go see Iris after her morning meeting, then we’ll see.” My cheek twitches as I pour two mugs of coffee. “Got some files to read. Angleton told me to deputize for him on a committee. Then there’s the structured cabling in D Block to worry about. The glamorous life of the secret agent, when he’s not actually out there saving the world . . . I was thinking, that story Andy came up with—do you want to look into it? Sanity-check Dr. Ford’s analysis?” I finish the question slowly, trying not to think too hard about the implications.
“You read my mind.” She adds milk to her coffee, stirring. “Not that everybody else in Research and Development with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN won’t be doing exactly the same thing, but you never know. I think I’ll go pay Mike a little visit this afternoon, if he’s got time.” She looks at me, eyes wide. They’re blue-green, I notice; it’s funny, that: I don’t usually pay attention to her eyes. “Are you all right?”
I nod. “Just a little unfocused today.”
“You and me both.” She manages a little laugh by way of conversational punctuation. “Well, I need to be off.” She takes a too-big mouthful of coffee and winces. “Sorry I’m leaving you with the washing up again.”
“That’s okay, I’ve got an extra hour.” No point showing up before Iris’s steering group meeting, is there? “Take care.”
“I will.” She picks up her handbag and the violin case and heads for the door, heels clicking: “Bye,” and she’s away, looking more like an accountant than a combat epistemologist.
I putter around for a while, then get dressed (jeans, tee shirt, gun belt, and linen blazer—mine is not a customer-facing job at present, and I hate ties) and prepare to head out. At the last minute I remember the NecronomiPod, sleeping (but not dead) beside the laptop. I grab it along with my usual phone and head for the bus stop.
“WELCOME TO BLOODY BARON,” SAYS IRIS, OFFERING ME A recycled cardboard folder with MOST SECRET stamped on the cover: “You have two hours to familiarize yourself with the contents before the Monday afternoon team meeting.”
She smiles brightly as she drops it on my desk, right on top of the archive box full of dusty paperwork that I’ve just signed for, care of the wee man with the handcart who does the twice-daily run to the stacks: “There will be an exam. On the upside, I’ve given your structured cabling files to Peter-Fred and the departmental email security awareness committee meeting for Wednesday is canceled due to illness—Jackie and Vic are spouting from both ends, apparently, and aren’t expected in until next week—so you’ve got some breathing space.”
“Thanks.” I try not to groan. “I’ll try not to obsess about Peter-Fred fucking up the wiring loom too much.”
“Don’t worry.” She waves a hand vaguely: “The cabling’s all going to be outsourced from next year anyhow.”
That gets my attention. “Outsourced?” I realize that shouting might deliver entirely the wrong message about my suitability for return to work and moderate my voice: “There are four, no, five, no—several, very good reasons why we do our own cabling, starting with security and ending with security. I really don’t think outsourcing it is a very good idea at all, unless it’s the kind of outsourcing which is actually insourcing to F Division via a subcontractor arrangement to satisfy our PPP quota requirements . . .”
And that’s another ten minutes wasted, bringing Iris up to speed on one of the minutiae of my job. It’s not her fault she doesn’t know where the dividing line between IT support scut-work and OPSEC protocol lies, although she catches on fast when I explain the predilection of class G3 abominations for traveling down Cat 5e cables and eating clerical staff, not to say anything about the ease with which a bad guy could stick a network sniffer on our backbone and do a man-in-the-middle attack on our authentication server if we let random cable installers loose under the floor tiles in the new building.
Finally she leaves me alone, and I open the cover on BLOODY BARON and start reading.
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER I’M THOROUGHLY SPOOKED BY MY reading—so much so that I’ve had to put the file down a couple of times when I caught myself scanning the same sentence over and over again with increasing disbelief. It comes as something of a relief when Iris knocks on my door again. “Showtime,” she says. “You coming?”
I shake the folder at her. “This is nuts!”
“Welcome to the monkey house, and have a banana.” She taps her wristwatch. “Room 206 in four minutes.”
I lock up carefully—the files I requisitioned from the stacks aren’t secret or above, but it’d still be professionally embarrassing if anyone walked in on them—and sketch a brief ward over the door. It flickers violet, then fades, plugging into the departmental security parasphere. I hurry towards the stairs.
Room 206 is up a level, with real windows and an actual view of the high street if you open the dusty Venetian blinds. There’s a conference table and a bunch of not-so-comfortable chairs (the better to keep people from falling asleep in meetings), and various extras: an ancient overhead slide projector, a lectern with a broken microphone boom, and a couple of tattered security awareness posters from the 1950s: “Is your co-worker a KGB mole, a nameless horror from beyond spacetime, or a suspected homosexual? If so, dial 4-SECURITY!” (I suspect Pinky has been exercising his curious sense of humor again.)
“Have a chair.” Iris winks at me. I take her up on the invitation as the door opens and three more attendees show up. Shona I recognize from previous encounters in ops working groups—she’s in-your-face Scottish, on the plump side, and has a brusque way of dealing with bureaucratic obstacles that doesn’t exactly encourage me to insert myself in her line of fire. I think she’s something to do with the Eastern Europe desk. “This is Shona MacDonald,” says Iris. “And Vikram Choudhury, and Franz Gustaffson, our liaison from the AIVD—Unit G6.” Franz nods affably enough, and I try to c
onceal my surprise. It’s an unusual name for the Netherlands, but I happen to know that his father was Danish. The last time I saw him, he was on what I was sure was a one-way trip to a padded cell for the rest of his life after sitting through one PowerPoint slide too many at a certain meeting in Darmstadt. The fine hair on the back of my neck stands on end.
“We’ve met,” I say, guardedly.
“Have we?” Franz looks at me with interest. “That’s interesting! You’ll have to tell me all about it later.”
Oh. So they only managed to save part of him.
“Allow me to introduce Bob, Bob Howard,” Iris tells them, and I nod and force a bland smile to cover up the horror.
“Mr. Howard is an SSO 3 and double-hats as our departmental IT security specialist and also as personal assistant to Dr. Angleton. A decision was taken to add him to this working group.” I notice the descent into passive voice; also some disturbing double takes from around the table, from Shona and Gustaffson. “He also—this is one of those coincidences I was talking about earlier—happens to be married to Agent CANDID.”
At which name Gustaffson drops all pretense at impassivity and stares at me as if I’ve just grown a second head. I nod at him. What the hell? Mo has a codeword all of her own? Presumably for overseas assignments like the Amsterdam job, but still . . .
“Bob. Would you be so good as to summarize your understanding of the background to BLOODY BARON for us?”
Oh Jeez. I clear my throat. “I’ve only had an hour and a half with the case files, so I may be misreading this stuff,” I admit. Shit, stop making excuses. It just makes you look lame. “BLOODY BARON appears to be a monitoring committee tasked with—well. The cold war never entirely ended, did it? There are too many vested interests on all sides who want to keep it simmering. And the upshot is that Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don’t need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction. Hence the current gas wars and economic blackmail.”
The Fuller Memorandum Page 9