I’m sure it’s all very eerie, but when reality starts to imitate a second-rate computer game you know the bad guys have over-egged the pudding. Some fuckhead is hitting me with a glamour in hope of spooking me. It’s the sort of tactic that might stand a chance of working if I was a little less cynical, or if they had enough imagination to make it, oh, you know, horrifying , or something. Luckily for me they don’t seem to have grasped the difference between a Sam Raimi movie and standing by your dad’s hospital bed trying to work up the nerve to switch off the ventilator. So I find the fact that they’re sending me woo-woo noises and mist perversely encouraging.
(I’m having second thoughts about the cultist thing, though. The probability of running into two different cells of the fuckers in the same month is vanishingly slim; and if this nonsense is a message from the same group that tried to landscape downtown Amsterdam last week, they’ve definitely sent the B-Team.)
I up my pace again, and just then I hear a scraping noise from the embankment to my left and every hair on my neck stands on end simultaneously.
I swing round, extending my arms in front of my face and sliding my index finger through the trigger guard as this thing clatters and scrambles down the side of the cutting in a mad dash towards me, a growl of hatred and hunger sounding an organ note deep in its chest, and I have time to think, I hate fucking dogs, just as it launches itself towards me.
I squeeze the trigger twice, aiming below where my eyes are focused on it—I can’t look away; I get a flash of bared fangs and slavering tongue, eyeless and horrid and taller than any dog I’ve ever imagined—and there’s a sound like a palm slapping a lump of wet meat as the gun kicks silently in my hand. I jump sideways as it slams into the track sleepers where I was standing a moment ago, howling a scream of agony and snapping those huge jaws at its own shoulder.
It’s not a dog. Dogs aren’t as black as a hole in space, and their musculature and articulation follow mammalian norms—this thing bends wrong as it bites and flails around, and I have an inkling of a memory that tells me I should be very afraid right now. But I’m not. I started out pissed off and I am now toweringly angry. Which is why I walk behind the flailing body, lower my aim towards the back of its skull, and call: “Show yourself right now, or the doggie gets it!”
There’s a low chuckle. “Give us the Teapot and we will let you live, mortal.”
Mortal? Yes, it’s the B-Team all right; probably in robes with upside-down crucifixes or something. They’re the occult equivalent of the kind of suicide bombers who post their confession videos on YouTube two weeks before they learn the hard way that trying to blow themselves up with chapatti flour isn’t going to do anything except give the police an excuse to pat themselves on the back and reassure the public that Everything Is Under Control. “Come out where I can see you,” I demand.
The hound-thing on the ground whines in agony. It’s getting on my nerves, cutting through the barricade of my determination—then I notice out of the corner of one eye that the shoulder I blew a fist-sized chunk out of is writhing and foaming, dark tubules questing inwards from the ripped and shredded edges. Shit. If this is what I think it is, then by summoning it the B-Team have bitten off more than they can chew—and so have I. “You’ve got five seconds,” I add. “It won’t die, but it’s going to be real pissed off. And I reckon it’s fifty-fifty whether it blames me or blames you.”
“Do you truly believe you can shoot one of the Hounds with impunity, mortal?”
I’ve got a bearing on Windbag now. Your typical B-Team idiot is either a religious fanatic who’s grown up listening to preacher-men ranting and foaming in seventeenth-century English, or they’re a wannabe who’s seen too many horror flicks. I’m betting on the second kind here. I take a step back—accidental contact with this particular species of doggie is about as safe as licking the third rail on the Underground—then quickly slip my left hand into my pocket and mutter the command word to ignite the Hand of Glory as I pull it out of my pocket.
Of course the HOG lights off promptly, but its little pinky is tangled in my pocket lining and comes free with a foul gust of scorched linen—something else to hold against the gloating ratfucker. I take a long step sideways, then another, holding the wrinkled hand at arm’s length out to one side. The Glock is a numbing drag on my opposite arm: nothing like as bad as a Browning, but I can’t keep this up forever.
A second voice chirps up from behind the thrashing Hound, about where I was standing five seconds ago: “Hey, where’d he go?”
(He sounds . . . dim. Let’s call him Minion #1.)
“Fuck!” That’s Windbag. He sounds pissed off. “We’re going to lose him! All-Highest will be displeased!”
“I’ve got the path.” A third voice, female and coldly controlled. Maybe she’s an A-Team player assigned to ride herd on the clown car. (She can be Minion #2 until proven competent.) “You walk the—”
No plan survives contact with the enemy—especially when the enemy is invisible, within earshot and taking notes—but even more importantly, no cultist survives physical contact with one of the Hounds. The doggie of doom flails one paw against the ground and its back arches as it goes into the seizure I’ve been expecting ever since I plugged it with a banishment round. Which is bad luck for Minion #1, who is in the path of one viciously barbed paw. He gives a brief gurgling scream, but is already dead by the time the sound reaches me: it’s just air venting from the corpse’s lungs and reverberating through its larynx on the way out. Every muscle in his body contracts simultaneously with a strange popping sound as his joints dislocate and ligaments tear, in a spasmodic breakdance that ends in a pile beside the Hound.
I don’t wait to see what they do next—I scramble up the dry soil embankment, moving diagonally between tree trunks.
“We’re going to lose him!” Minion #2 calls in a high, bell-ringing voice. “Fallback plan!” Okay, she’s promoted to Mistress. I think for a moment that she’s telling Windbag to withdraw, but then I hear the second truly spine-chilling noise of the evening, the unmistakable sound of someone racking the slide on a pump-action shotgun.
I throw myself flat against the side of the embankment and roll over on my back, still clutching the Hand of Glory and my pistol as the two robed figures on the path raise their weapons and pour fire past each other, sweeping up and down the bike path. They set up a reverberating roar that jars the teeth in my head: they’re not aiming, they’re simply spraying clouds of buckshot at waist level. I’m about two meters up the embankment above them, and twenty meters away. Holding my breath, I glance at the HOG in my left hand. The fingertips are burning steadily—I have perhaps three or four minutes of invisibility. Odds of two to one, shotguns against silenced pistol, at twenty meters? Not good. I could probably take them—probably, but I’d have to put the Hand of Glory down, and if I didn’t get them both with my first two shots I’d be giving the survivor a muzzle flash to aim for. With a shotgun, let’s not forget.
Fucking B-Team cultists. If this was the A-Team, they’d summon something exotic and deadly to set on my ass—something I’d have a chance of banishing. But the B-Team were at the back of the queue the day All-Highest was handing out death spells, so they just blaze away with shotguns.
Ten rounds later—it feels like having my head slammed in a doorway ten times in a row—they lower their guns. “He’s legged it,” says Windbag.
“Right. We’re leaving.” Mistress’s voice is so chilly you could rent it out as an air conditioner. “Philip is dead. This will not be received well by All-Highest. Let me do the talking, if you value your life.”
“But can’t we—” Windbag whines.
I don’t hear what he says next, though, because Mistress says something in a voice that distorts weirdly as she speaks: and then a hole in the air opens and closes, and they’re not there anymore. Neither is the Hound. It’s gone, taking the corpse of Minion #1 back to wherever it is that the Hounds come from. The glamour is gone, too: bel
ow me, the cycle path is restored—just another rustic suburban alleyway, lit by the streetlight glare from the nighttime clouds overhead.
I shudder uncontrollably for a minute. Then I carefully extinguish the fingers of the HOG, holster my pistol, stumble back down the embankment to the footpath, and dust myself off.
They weren’t after Mo: they were after me. They knew how to find me and they wanted to know about the Teapot. Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action, which means it’s time to go to work.
9.
NIGHT SHIFT
WALKING TO THE OFFICE ISN’T SOMETHING I’D NORMALLY DO, because it takes about three hours, but I am feeling inconveniently surveilled and I don’t like the idea of the MAGINOT BLUE STARS network being able to track me. So I follow the footpath for another half kilometer before reigniting the Hand of Glory and dashing back almost all the way I’ve come, then exiting onto a side street. I take two corners and jump a fence into somebody’s backyard before I extinguish the HOG again, then walk out casually with my shoulders back and my chin up.
A bus ride in an irrelevant direction takes me ten minutes farther away from the office—then it’s into a back alley and time to reignite the HOG for a brisk kilometer. Finally I snuff it out and catch a different bus that passes close enough to the New Annexe that I can walk from the stop.
I march up to the darkened C&A staff entrance and key my number, then swipe my pass card. The door clicks, and I step inside. It’s totally black, and in the gloom I can hear the restless shuffling of one of the night staff. I pull out my warrant card hastily, lest I be eaten by a grue: arguing with the night watchmen is singularly futile unless you do it with a chain saw or a baseball bat.
“Brrrrr—”
“Get me a torch,” I snap. The warrant card is all very well—it sheds a faint, nacreous glow—but the backlight invocation has unpleasant side effects if you crank up the lumens too high. (Why is it that all the movies make it look as if wizards find invoking light easy? Tenuous glows and balefire are all very well, but there’s a reason we use fluorescent tubes around here.)
“—rains?” he asks plaintively.
A torch flicks on and I see the wizened face of its holder. “Here, give me that.” I take the torch, being careful to hold the warrant card between me and the doorman. I think he might be Fred from Accounting, but if so, he’s definitely a bit the worse for wear these days; it’s several years since he died, and not everyone around here gets the deluxe Jeremy Bentham treatment. Mostly HR just arrange for one of us to stick them in a summoning grid and bind one of the eaters in the night to service (weak, minimally sentient efflorescences of alien will, that can animate a corpse and control it just about enough to push a broom, or scare the living daylights out of unwanted nighttime visitors). I gather it saves on funeral expenses. “Stay here and forget I came this way. That’s an order.”
I climb the stairs, leaving the residual human resource behind to eat any unwitting B-Team cultists who were stupid enough to tail me. It’s past midnight and they make regular inspection rounds, so I keep my card out and hope like hell the battery in this plastic piece of shit lasts until I make it to my office. I keep a proper torch there, a Maglite that’ll work properly when it’s time to go visit Angleton’s lair and turf those files from top to bottom. Luckily the plastic piece of shit holds out and I let myself in, flick on the light, shut the door, and flop down behind my desk with a sigh of relief.
“Took your time getting here, didn’t you, boy?”
In the time it takes me to peel myself off the ceiling and return my pistol to its holster, Angleton takes up residence in my visitor’s chair, folding his ungainly limbs around himself like a spindly black spider. The skeletal, humorless grin tells me I’m in trouble even before I open my mouth.
“I’ve waited here for three consecutive nights. What delayed you?”
I close my mouth. Then I open it and close it again a couple of times, just for practice. Finally, when I trust myself to speak, I say one word: “Cultists.”
“Three days, boy. Suppose you tell me what you’ve learned?”
“One moment.” My paranoia is growing. I take out my phone and peer at him through its camera. TRUESEER tells me that I am, indeed, looking at my boss, who is looking increasingly irritated. I make the shiny vanish. “Okay. From the top: the Fuller Memorandum is missing, the Russians have gotten all upset, cultists are throwing their toys out of the pram, and everyone wants to know about the Teapot. Oh, and someone in Research and Development says that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn’t going to wait a couple of years, but is due to kick off in a few weeks or months at the most. What am I missing?”
Angleton stares at me coldly. “You’re missing the spy, boy.”
“The”—I nearly swallow my tongue—“spy?”
“Yes: Helen Langhorn. Aged seventy-four, widow of Flight Lieutenant Adrian Langhorn, long-term resident of Cosford, working part-time at the museum as a volunteer. Met her husband while she was in the WRAAF back in 1963. Which is a pretty interesting occupation for her to have been in, considering that she was also a captain in the Russian Army and a GRU Illegal who was inserted into the UK in 1959, when she was barely out of her teens.”
I make an inarticulate gurgling noise. “But she—the hangar—she wasn’t—she can’t have—”
Angleton waits for me to wind down. “The many-angled ones are not the only enemy this country has ever faced, boy. Some of us remember.” (It’s okay for him to say that—I was about ten when the cold war ended!)
“Helen Langhorn’s primary assignment did not come to an end just because the Soviet Union collapsed. To outward appearances her utility had been in decline for many years, after her husband failed to achieve advancement, costing her access to people and bases; once she hit sixty with no long-term prospects they wrote her off. That is one of the risks one runs with long-term Illegals—their entire life may be marginalized by one or two unfortunate and unpredictable errors. There are probably fifty others like her in the UK—retired bank managers and failed politicians’ wives pruning their privet hedges and daydreaming of the revolution that failed them. Or perhaps they accept it gladly, happy to no longer be a pawn on the chessboard. But in any case, Helen’s career appears to have undergone a brief second flowering in the last few years.”
“But she”—I flap my jaws inarticulately—“she was halfway to dementia!”
“Was she?” Angleton raises a skeptical eyebrow. “She was on the front desk of a museum gallery barely two hundred meters from Hangar 12B, where Airframe 004 is being cannibalized for spare parts to keep the other three white elephants airworthy. You may think that no more than a coincidence, but I don’t.”
“You never told me what that stuff about the white elephants was about—”
“I expected you to find out for yourself, boy.” Then Angleton does something I absolutely never expected to see: he sighs unhappily.
“Boss?”
Angleton leans back in his chair. “Tell me about Chevaline,” he asks.
“Chevaline?” I frown. “Wasn’t that some sort of nuclear missile program from the sixties or seventies, something like that?”
“Chevaline.” He pauses. “Back in the 1960s, when Harold Wilson cut a deal with Richard Nixon to buy Polaris missiles for the Royal Navy, the tacit assumption was that a British nuclear deterrent need merely be sufficient to pound on Moscow until the rubble bounced. During the 1970s, the Soviets began to construct an anti-ballistic-missile shield around Moscow. It was crude by modern standards: anti-missile rockets with nuclear warheads—but it would have rendered the British Polaris force obsolete. So during the 1970s, a succession of Conservative and Labour governments pushed through a warhead upgrade scheme that replaced the original MRV warheads with far more sophisticated MIRV buses, equipped with decoys and able to engage two targets rather than one. The project was called Chevaline; it cost a billion pounds back in the day—when a billion pounds was real money—and they di
dn’t even tell the Cabinet.”
“A billion pounds? With no oversight?” I blink rapidly. We’re subject to spot audits on office stationery, all the way down to paper clips.
“Yes.” Angleton smiles sepulchrally. “We helped ensure security, so that it was relatively easy for them to spend an extra two hundred million pounds in 1977 to keep the Concorde production lines at Filton and Bristol open for long enough to produce four extra airframes for the RAF,” Angleton says blandly. “The Plumbers ensured that nobody remembered a thing afterwards.”
“RAF 666 Squadron fly Concordes?”
“Flew them,” Angleton corrects me. “The long-range occult reconnaissance model, not the nuclear-armed model the RAF originally asked for in 1968. You may not be aware of this, but Prototype 002 was built with attachment points for a bomb bay before the project was abandoned; Bomber Command wanted to replace V-force with a fleet of supersonic bombers that could carry Blue Steel nuclear stand-off bombs to Moscow, but the Navy won the toss. Instead, the RAF got the recon version, with supercargo space for the six demonologists and the optics bench to open the gate they needed to fly through.”
My jaw is beginning to ache from all the speechless opening-and-closing cycles. “You’re shitting me.”
Angleton shakes his head. “The Squadron was based in Filton and Heathrow, flying in British Airways livery—the aircraft movements were described as charter flights, and they wore the hull numbers of BA airframes that were currently undergoing maintenance. They flew one mission a week, departing west over the Atlantic. They refueled from a VC-10 tanker, then the supercargo would open a gate and they’d make a high-speed run across the dead plateau before reopening the gate home and landing at Filton for decontamination and exorcism. It’s all in CODICIL BLACK SKULL. Which you are cleared to read, incidentally.”
The Fuller Memorandum Page 16