I shudder. I knew someone with a level three glamour about her once. Men would die for a chance to bed her if she crooked her little finger at them—often literally. The theological equivalent . . . I don’t want to think about it. “So. Amsterdam, then . . . ?” I prompt her.
“Four of them were already there. Another three flew in the week before; that’s why the full-dress incident watch was started. AIVD thought it was preparation for an abortion clinic bombing campaign at first. But then the pastor bought a couple of white goats and the penny dropped and they threw it at Franz and his friends, who asked us to chip in.”
“Goats—”
“Goats, sacrificial, summoning, for the purpose of. The Watch Team were so busy keeping an eye on the explosives stockpile that nobody noticed the metalworking tools and the crucifixes, or the fact that they’d rented a deconsecrated Lutheran chapel three months earlier and invited their bishop over for a flying visit. It was only last Tuesday that they put two and two together and realized what was really going on. That’s when they called me in.”
She looks bleak and alone, clutching her wineglass as if it’s the sole source of warmth in the world.
“The bomb was a decoy. Turns out there were two cells working, one of whom—outer church—didn’t know they were set up as a cover story. The other cell, the ones with the goat and the summoning grid in the crypt of the chapel, they were the real operators, initiates of the true faith. They were all set to open a gate to a, a—” She swallows. I sit down next to her and take her free hand in mine. “I hate those things,” she says plaintively.
“It wasn’t just goats, was it?” I probe. “The goats were the setup for something else.”
“The chapel was right next to a nursery school,” she says, and falls silent.
Ick is about all I can say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and squeeze her hand gently until she feels like continuing.
“We’d picked up a squad of UIM specialists and a police anti-terrorism group who prepared to seal off the area. Trouble is, it was mid-afternoon and the neighborhood was busy; the last thing you want to do is to run an anti-terrorism exercise next door to a nursery school when the parents are coming to pick their kids up. It’s a target-rich zone and it draws journalists like flies to a sewage farm. So we were going to hold off until evening. But then the OCCULUS command truck monitors lost the sound from the bugs, and I began to pick up probability disturbances in the vicinity of the chapel, and it looked too risky to hold off. The troops went in, and I followed them. It was unpleasant.”
“What did they . . . ?”
“They’d built a summoning grid in the altar. And they’d set up a greater circuit, with a geodesic pointing straight at the . . . the nursery school over the road.” She dry swallows again. “They started with the goats as a warm-up exercise. But there was a homeless woman, and they’d used her as, as—” Mo gulps, then wipes her lips. “Intestines. Ropes and hanks and skeins of—a greater circuit made of human guts, still joined to the sacrifice.” She’s not swallowing: she’s trying not to throw up.
“Stop.” I try to let go of her hand. “You don’t need to go on.”
“I need to.” She clenches her fist around my fingers and stares at me. “They’d crucified her, you know? The microphones picked up their prayers earlier: I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me—they meant it literally. I don’t know why we didn’t hear the screams, I think they might have sedated her first. I hope they, they did that.” That’s a forlorn hope; pain is a power source in its own right. But I don’t remind her of this. She’s shaking now: “The gate was open, Bob. I had to go through.”
My Joan of Arc. I rescued Mo, once, years ago; it’s ironic, a real giggle, that she turns out to be stronger and tougher than I am. Would you dive through a steaming intestinal gate into a soul-sucking void, armed only with a violin flensed from the bones of screaming sacrifices? She did. And she kept a lid on it afterwards, a stiff upper lip, while I was shuddering and stressed over what was basically an industrial accident. It’s a good thing to put your problems in perspective from time to time, but right now I’d rather not, because I’m doing the comparison right now and I find I’m coming up so short I’m ashamed of myself.
“The things in the cultists’ bodies had already eaten the blonde teacher’s face and most of her left leg,” Mo tells me earnestly, “but the Somali boy-child was still screaming, so I had to go after him.”
I feel my gorge rising: “Too much.” I splash wine into my empty glass and take a too-hasty swig. “Jesus, Mo—”
Jesus was evidently the wrong word; she stands and manages to make it as far as the doorway, en route to the bathroom, before she doubles over and sprays the wine-soaked remains of her dinner on the floor.
I make it to the sink and pull the plastic bowl and the cleaning supplies out, then fetch her a glass of tap water. “Rinse and spit,” I say, holding the bowl under her mouth.
“Fucking gods, Bob—”
“Bed. Now.”
“We killed the bad things, but, but the little girl with the pigtails, I managed to carry her head back but it was too late—”
She’s crying now, and it’s all coming out, all the ugly details in a torrent like a vomiting storm sewer unloading a decade of pain and bloody shit and piss, and I carry her up the stairs as best I can and tuck her under the duvet. And she’s still crying, although the racking sobs are coming further apart. “Sleep and remember,” I tell her, touching her forehead: “Remember it’s all over.” I pull my ward over my head and hang it round her neck. “Repeat command light paramnesia level two, eight hours REM, master override, endit.” Then I touch her forehead again. “It’s over, Mo, you can let go of it now.”
As I go downstairs to clean up, I hear her beginning to snore.
MOPPING UP VOMIT AND CONSIGNING THE WRECKAGE OF DINNER to the recycling bin and the dishwasher keeps me distracted for ten minutes, but unfortunately not distracted enough to avoid looping through everything Mo said in my mind’s eye. I can’t help it. I’ve been through some bad shit myself, similar stuff. I’ve been through situations where you just keep going, keep pushing through, because if you stop you’ll never start again: but for all that, this one was particularly horrifying.
I think it’s the civilian involvement that does it; I’m more or less able to look after myself, and so is Mo, but a primary school . . . I don’t want to think about that, but I can’t stop, because this is where we’re all going, when the walls of reality come tumbling down and the dead gods begin to stir in their crypts. It’s put me in a theological frame of mind, and I hate that.
Let me try to explain . . .
I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.
I’m a child of the enlightenment; I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren’t easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist. Consequently, I’d much rather dismiss theology and religious belief as superstitious rubbish. My idea of a comforting belief system is your default English atheism . . . except that I know too much.
See, we did evolve more or less randomly. And the little corner of the universe we live in is 13.73 billion years old, not 5,000 years old. And there’s no omnipotent, omniscient, invisible sky daddy in the frame for the problem of pain. So far so good:
I live free in an uncaring cosmos, rather than trapped in a clockwork orrery constructed by a cosmic sadist.
Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t end there. The things we sometimes refer to as elder gods are alien intelligences, which evolved on their own terms, unimaginably far away and long ago, in zones of spacetime which aren’t normally connected to our own, where the rules are different. But that doesn’t mean they can’t reach out and touch us. As the man put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God—the angry monotheistic sadist subtype. And the elder ones . . . aren’t friendly.
(See? I told you I’d rather be an atheist!)
I push the button on the dishwasher, straighten up, and glance at the kitchen clock. It’s pushing ten thirty, but I’m wide awake and full of bleak existential rage. I don’t want to go to bed; I might disturb Mo, and she really needs her sleep right now. So I tiptoe upstairs to check on her, use the bathroom, then retreat downstairs again. But that leaves me with a choice between sitting in a kitchen that smells of bleach and a living room that smells of sour fear-memories. I can’t face the inanities of television or the solace of a book. I feel restless. So I clip on my holster, pull on my jacket, and go outside for a walk.
It may be summer but it’s already dark and the streetlights are on. I walk down the leafy pavement, between the neatly trimmed front hedges and the sleeping cars parked nose to tail. The lichen-stained walls and battered wheelie bins are stained by the stale orange twilight reflected from the clouds. Traffic rumbles in the distance, pulsing with the freight of the unsleeping city. Here and there I see front windows illuminated from within by the shadow puppet play of televisual hallucinations. I turn a corner, walk downhill under the old railway bridge, then left past a closed back street garage. Cats slink through the moonless twilight with nervous stealth; the smell of night-blooming pollen meshes with the gritty taste of diesel particulates at the back of my throat. I walk through the night, wrapped in my anger, and as I walk I think:
Angleton is missing. Why? And where? He doesn’t live anywhere, according to Human Resources; doesn’t have a life. Well, that’s not much of a surprise. Angleton’s grasp on mundane humanity has always struck me as tenuous—the idea that there’s a four-hundred-year-old stone cottage in a village in the countryside, and a Mrs. Angleton puttering around hanging out the laundry on a line in the back garden, simply doesn’t work for me. He goes beyond the usual monasticism of the man who married his job; he never takes holidays, he’s always in the office, and then there’s the photograph. (Maybe he inherited it from Dorian Gray?) So, let this be Clue #1 that something is wrong. Angleton never does anything by accident, so either something is rotten in the state of Denmark, or he’s embarked on a caper he didn’t see fit to tell anyone about.
I turn right, across a main road—quiet at this time of night—then along and left down an alleyway that leads between rows of high back-garden fences. Grass grows beneath the crumbling, silvery woodwork and around the wheelie bins; here’s a concrete yard where someone has parked a decaying caravan, its windows frosted dark in the urban twilight.
The Fuller Memorandum is missing. Whatever is in it is still a hot potato after seventy-odd years. Angleton was interested in it, and in BLOODY BARON, and in this new business about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN coming into effect sooner rather than later.
Item: Why are the Russians sniffing around? And what did Panin mean about finding the Teapot? He can’t be talking about Ungern Sternberg’s psychotic batman, can he? I did some checking. Teapot was fragged by Ungern Sternberg’s own rebellious troops in 1921, right before they handed the Baron over to Trotsky’s commissars. At least, the mutineers said they shot him. If he’d run away into the Siberian forest, alone, might they have concocted some cock-and-bull cover story . . . ?
I make a right turn into a narrow path. It leads to a tranquil bicycle track, walled in beech and chestnut trees growing from the steep embankments to either side and sporadically illuminated by isolated lampposts. It used to be a railway line, decades ago, one of the many suburban services closed during the Beeching cuts—but it wasn’t a commuter line. (I stumbled across it not long after we moved to this part of town, and it caught my attention enough to warrant some digging.)
The Necropolis Service ran from behind Waterloo station to the huge Brookwood cemetery in Surrey; tickets were sold in two classes, one-way and return. This is one of its tributaries, a tranquil creek feeding the great river of the dead. Today, cyclists use it to bypass the busy main roads on their way into the center. It is, however, unaccountably unpopular with the after-work exercise set, and I have the left lane to myself as I walk, still chewing over what I know and what I don’t know.
CLUB ZERO and Mo. Who sent Uncle Fester? I see three alternatives: Panin and his friends, the cultists she was sent to shut down, or some third party. Taking it from the top: Panin is a professional, and can be expected to usually play by the rules. Sending a zombie to doorstep an officer in a foreign nation’s service at home just isn’t done; it’s not businesslike, and besides, once you start sending assassins to bump off the oppo, you’ve got no guarantee that their assassins aren’t going to outperform yours. The reason great powers don’t usually engage in wars of assassination is that it levels the playing field. On the other hand, cultists like the perps behind CLUB ZERO are far more likely to do that sort of thing. Assassination and terrorism are Siamese twins: tools for outsiders and pressure groups. So my money is on Uncle Fester being an emissary from the cultists the AIVD called Mo in to neutralize . . . unless there’s a third faction in play, a prospect I find far too scary to contemplate.
The cycle path narrows, and descends deeper into its cutting. The lights are more widely spaced here, and a number of them are out. Hearing a rustling scampering sound behind me, I glance round as something flickers in the bushes between lights—dog-like, with a great bush of a tail. An urban fox? Maybe: I didn’t see the ears or muzzle, though. Urban foxes aren’t a problem (unless you’re a cat), but feral dogs might be another matter. I keep walking in the twilight. London is warm and humid in summer, but down here it’s almost clammy-cold, and there’s a faint whiff of something like a sewer, sweet and slightly rotten. I break into a slow jog, aiming to outrun the stench.
I have a growing, edgy feeling that I’ve missed something critically important. I’ve been plowing along, in harness and under stress, assuming that the crises I’m trying to deal with are all independent. But what if they aren’t? I ask myself. What if Angleton’s disappearance is connected to Panin’s search for the Teapot, what if the Fuller Memorandum holds an explanation, what if the cultists know that we stand closer to the threshold of the End Times than we realize and are trying to topple the balance, or perhaps to steal—
There’s a crack of dead branches under the trees behind me. Panting inhuman breath punctuates the thudding of a four-footed pursuit. The orange sodium glare leaches away around me, giving way to a different shade of darkness. Trees loom overhead, clutching at each other with wizened arms as bony as concentration camp victims’. A thin mist at foot level obscures the tarmac path and my stomach lurches. I’m not running through suburban London anymore; I’m running along the ghostly track bed of the Necropolitan line, and the hounds of hell are on my trail, and I left my protective ward with Mo, and I am a fucking imbecile. Shit, shit, shit.
Whatever the thing behind me is, it’s only seconds away. My heart’s already thudding uncomfortably from jogging an hour after dinner—fucking stupid of me—but while I’m ninety percent sure that I’m being tracked by something that’s about as bad as the proverbial hellhound, in which case I really ought to simply plug it with my pistol and ask questions later, I’ve got an even nastier feeling that it’s tracking me for someone, or worse, herding me along.
I have: a gun, a Hand of Glory, and a JesusPhone. So of course I draw my phone and flip the case open, thumb-swipe to un
lock, and spin round, raising the camera to focus as I tap the grinning skull icon.
There’s method in my madness and my pursuer isn’t mindless—I get a glimpse of flying haunches and bushy tail as it leaps off the path and into the trees with a startled “yip!”
The screen flashes a red-rimmed maw gaping at me and my hair stands on end as the phone and my fingertips are engulfed in pale blue fire. Balefire , it used to be called. I hastily go back to the main screen and stab another app: a diagnostic. Seeing what it says, I swear quietly and pull up another one that sets a spinning wireframe projection of a 5D Tesseract on the screen as it does its valiant best to set up a ward around me. The dog-thing is hiding and the tendrils of mist draw away from my feet, so I shove the phone in my pocket—still running—and draw my pistol. Then I turn back to the way I was going.
The emulator running on the phone’s a poor substitute for a real ward, and it’s only going to keep it up for as long as its battery can keep its tiny electronic brain running at full power, but armed and warded is the first step to survival and now I see the peril I’m in with an icy clarity. The second app I looked at was the thaumometer, and I should have kept an eye on it earlier, as I walked—it’s almost off the chart. And all because I’m walking the Necropolitan line. If you wanted to set up a ley line, what better source of power could you hope for than the accumulated grief and sorrow of millions of mourners, to say nothing of the decaying lives of the corpses that traveled it? I should have seen it coming—but I usually only use this cycle path as a shortcut to and from the tube station, in daylight.
I’m pretty sure I’m being trailed by cultists. When I left home I was angry in the abstract but now I am really fucked off. These are the bastards who murdered a bunch of nursery school tots and their teachers, put Mo through the horrors—and they’re trying for me now. The only question is, are they chasing me or herding me?
I keep going, slowing my jog to a brisk walk, scanning ahead as I move. I hold my gun at the ready with both hands, close to my chest, relying on the invisibility ward to make it look as if I’m just clutching my right wrist with my left hand. The mist at ground level coils and curdles around a pair of translucent parallel rails the color of old bones, resting on a bed of ethereal track sleepers. The trees writhe and knot overhead, clutching at each other, imploring and beseeching. In the distance I hear odd noises—the ghost of sobbing, deep voices intoning something, words I can’t quite make out.
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