I shake myself and take a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that the RAF has a squadron of black Concordes which they currently keep in a hangar at RAF Cosford? Helen Langhorn was a former Soviet spy who, by a happy accident—for her employers—was in a position to poke around them? Which she did, with results that . . .” I shudder, remembering again: a purple flash, face shrinking and crumpling in on itself around the harsh lines of her skull. “And now the Thirteenth Directorate are sniffing round?”
“Very good! We’ll make a professional paranoid out of you one of these days.” Angleton nods, grudging approval.
“Concorde.” I do a double take. “But they’ve been retired, right?”
“That put a crimp on the cover story, certainly. These days they fly only at night, described as American B-1Bs if anyone asks. A big bomber with four engines and afterburners is a much flimsier cover, and the plane spotters and conspiracy theorists keep the Plumbers busy, but we cannot neglect the watch on the dead plateau. If the thing in the pyramid should stir—” He makes an abrupt cutting gesture with the edge of one hand.
“Dead plateau? Thing in the pyramid?” I’ve got no idea what he’s referring to, but it sounds ominous.
“You’ve been through a gate to elsewhere.” I remember a world in the grip of fimbulwinter, where the rivers of liquid air ran down through valleys of ice beneath a moon carved with the likeness of Hitler’s face. “There are other, more permanent, elsewheres. Some of them we must monitor continuously. That world . . . pray you never see it, boy, and pray that the sleeping god in the pyramid never awakens.”
I tilt my head from side to side, trying to spill the invisible goop that’s clogging up my mind. Thinking in here is difficult, as if the air, hazy with the congealed fumes of state secrets, is impeding my ability to reason—
“Boss. Why are you here? Everyone thinks you’ve gone missing, AWOL with no forwarding address.”
Angleton grins skeletally. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
My eyes are feeling hot and gritty from too much stress and too little sleep, but I manage to roll them anyway. “Big problem: you just tipped me off. Can you give me a reason not to out you to the BLOODY BARON team—other than ‘because I said so’?”
“Of course.” He looks increasingly, alarmingly, amused. What have I gotten myself into this time? “You’ll keep it to yourself because while the cat’s away the mice may play, and one of this particular bunch of mice appears to be a security leak, and I’m setting a trap for them. You’re the bait, by the way.”
“I’m the—”
“And to sex you up so they come after you, I’ve got a little job for you to do.”
“Right, that’s it, I’m through with—”
“Assuming you want to nail the scum responsible for the CLUB ZERO incident in Amsterdam.”
“—fucking cultists—really?”
“Yes, Bob.” He has the good grace not to look too smug. “Now shut up and listen, there’s a good boy.”
He deposits a slim memo on my desk, then places a small plastic baggie on top of it. I squint at it: it’s empty except for a paper clip.
“Here’s what I want you to do . . .”
CLASSIFIED: TEAPOT BARON TYBURN
FROM: Fuller, Laundry
TO: 17F, Naval Intelligence Division
Dear Ian,
Hope all’s well (and my best regards to your mother, long may she keep her nose out of operational matters).
You enquired about Teapot.
Subsequent to the death of Burdokovskii in 1921, Q Division determined that the preta referenced in the Sternberg Fragment had returned to the six paths, and if it could be recalled and bound into a suitable host it might be compelled to the service of the state. Given the magnitude of the powers possessed by this particular entity, this was considered a desirable objective; however, its reincarnation required that we provide the hungry ghost with a new host. Obviously, this presented them with a headache; so some bright spark finally came up with the idea of asking the Home Office. A request was accordingly submitted in 1923.
Due to the 1924 election and subsequent upheavals and crises, the request was not actually considered at ministerial level until 1928, in which year the Prime Minister and Home Secretary agreed, not without considerable argument, to sanction the use of the ritual as an alternative method of capital punishment on one occasion only. I am not at liberty to disclose the identity of the murderer in question—he has in any case paid the ultimate price—but after his hanging was announced, he was relocated to a secret location. No less a surgeon than Mr. Gillies, working under an oath of strict secrecy, was employed to remodel the features of the sacrificial vessel lest any former acquaintance recognize him. Then the Hungry Ghost Ritual was performed, in a ceremony so harrowing that I would not relish being called upon to perform it again.
I shall not burden you with the tiresome sequence of obstacles that fate threw before us after we summoned the Teapot. Teaching it to speak, and to walk, and to make use of a human body once more was tedious in the extreme; for example we had to straitjacket and gag it for the first six months, lest it eat its fingers and lips. For almost a year it seemed likely that we had made a horrible mistake, and had merely driven a condemned murderer into the arms of insanity. However, in early 1930 Teapot began to communicate, and then to retrieve portions of the deceased memories—speaking in Russian as well as English, a language with which the vessel was unfamiliar. Shortly thereafter, it began also to evince a marked skill in the more esoteric areas of mathematics, and to show signs of the monstrous, cold intellect that so disturbed Baron Von Ungern Sternberg.
When the Teapot committee received permission to reincarnate the preta it was immediately realized that we would need to bind it to our service. Ungern Sternberg was able to placate it with a steady supply of victims, but His Majesty’s Government in time of peace was not so well placed. (If we had received the go-ahead to deal with the Socialists, things would have been different; but it’s no use crying over spilt milk.) Consequently, from 1928 to 1930 we worked tirelessly on a new model geas or binding—one that can restrain not only a human soul, but an eater of same. I shall spare you the grisly details, but in April 1930 we performed the binding rite for the first time, and Teapot was demonstrated to be under our full authority. It did not submit willingly, and I regret to inform you that the death of Dr. Somerfeld in that year—attributed to an apoplectic fit in his obituary in the Times—was only one part of the heavy price we paid.
Having bound the Angra Mainyu it was now necessary to indoctrinate it and train it to pass for a true Englishman. To this end, we obtained a place for it as Maths tutor at Sherborne, where it was enrolled in Lyon House as a master. Every public school in England is crawling with masters who are not entirely right in the head as a result of their experiences on the Front, and it was our consensus opinion that Teapot’s more minor eccentricities would not attract excessive notice, while the major ones (such as the regrettable tendency to eat souls) could be kept under control by our geas.
I retired from the Teapot committee with my official retirement from service in 1933. I did not encounter Teapot again until 1940 and my reactivation in this highly irregular role.
Today, Teapot is almost unrecognizable. When we set out to turn the monster into an Englishman we succeeded too well. He is urbane, witty, possessed of a wicked but well-concealed sense of humor, and utterly lacking in the conscienceless brutality of the hungry ghost that possessed Ensign Evgenie Burdokovskii in Ulan Bator all those years ago. Sherborne did its usual job—that of turning savages into servants of empire—and did it to our carefully constructed house master just as thoroughly as to any Hottentot from the home counties.
I am afraid that our initial objective—to chain a hungry ghost to the service of the state—has only been a qualified success: qualified because we succeeded too well. Teapot sincerely believes in playing the game, in honor and service and
all the other ideals we cynically dismiss at our peril. Unfortunately this renders him less than useful for the task in hand. We have (I hesitate to say this) reformed a demon in our own image, or rather, in the image we were trained to revere. We would be fools to undo this work now: this preta knows us too well. We captured it once, but next time we might not be so lucky.
Despite being useless to us as an Eater of Souls, Teapot is not without worth. I have drafted it into this new organization, where I believe we can put it to good use while maintaining a discreet watch. We can always use a hungry ghost, possessed of a disturbing brilliance in the dark arts, hidden within the urbane skin of an Englishman. It understands what makes us tick, shares—thanks to years of compulsion and indoctrination—our goals, and it has an eerie judgement of character, too—I believe it may be of significant use to the Doublecross committee in rooting out enemy spies. But if you’re thinking of using it as a weapon, I would advise you to think again: I’m not sure the geas, or Teapot’s indoctrination, would hold together if it is allowed to unleash its full power. Teapot is the sort of gun you fire only once—then it explodes in your hand.
Signed: J. F. C. Fuller
I’M NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN HOW I GOT HERE FROM THERE: JUST take it as given that it is now ten o’clock in the morning, I am still in the office (but called Mo half an hour ago to see she’s okay), I haven’t shaved or slept, and there’s a BLOODY BARON meeting in five minutes. I’ve got Amarok running on my desktop (playing “Drowning in Berlin” on endless repeat, because I need a pounding beat to keep me awake) and I’ve plowed through the CODICIL BLACK SKULL file that Angleton left me, and then on into a bunch of tedious legwork for this morning’s session. I’m suffering from severe cognitive dissonance; every so often you think you’ve got a handle on this job, on the paper clip audits and interminable bureaucracy and committee meetings, and then something insane crawls out of the woodwork and gibbers at you, something crazy enough to give James Bond nightmares that just happen to be true.
I close the CBS file and I’m just sticking it back in my secure document safe when Iris pops her head round the door. “Bob? Are you ready to do battle with BLOODY BARON yet?”
I groan quietly. “I think I need a coffee, but yeah, I’ll be along just as soon as I’ve locked this . . .” I poke at the keypad and it tweedles happily. Not that an electronic lock is the only security we rely on; anyone who tries to crack this particular safe is going to wake up in hospital with a hangover the size of a whale.
“White, no sugar, right?”
“You’re a star. I’ll be right with you.” Did I remember to say good management cures the King’s Evil and makes coffee, too? Because if not, it’s all true.
Ten minutes later I’m sitting in Room 206 again, with a mug of passable paint stripper in front of me and a printout of the minutes. It’s a very cut-down rump session today. Franz is absent, Iris is tapping her fingers and Shona is looking as if she’d like to be away with the fairies while Choudhury drones on: “No observed deviations from traffic intercept patterns established over the past week, and no notified agent movements yesterday—”
What the hell, I’m bored. I clear my throat.
Choudhury glances at me, irritated: “What is it, Howard?”
“These non-existent agent movements wouldn’t happen to include Panin, would they? Because I’m sure if Panin so much as farted in F-flat minor our boys would be up his arse with a gas spectrograph, wouldn’t they?”
I am pleased to see that both Shona and Iris are paying attention: Shona’s nostrils flare unconsciously and Iris raises an eyebrow at me. Choudhury, however, is a harder nut. He frowns. “Don’t be silly. Of course they’d spot him if he was in the UK.”
“Really?” I lean back, cross my arms, and bare my teeth at him. Maybe he’ll mistake it for a grin. “Explain last night, then.”
“Last n—” He stops dead. “What happened last night?”
I glance at the Sitrep folder. “Panin isn’t in the UK, according to that folder. So how exactly is it that he picked me up as I was leaving work and bought me a pint of ESB in the Frog and Tourettes?”
“Preposterous.” Choudhury glares. Neither Shona nor Iris is smiling.
“You’d better explain,” Iris tells me.
“What I said. Here is a hint: Panin knew. He tried to pump me about Teapot, so I played dumb. He knows the rules; left me a calling card. It’s downstairs in the Security Office safe. For reasons of operational security I didn’t report the contact immediately, but I’m reporting it now. The Plumbers should be able to confirm it from the pub CCTV.” I sit up. “Personally, I find the implications highly suggestive.”
“Why did you not tell Security—” Shona stops, her eyes widening.
“We’re not as secure as we’d like to be. I’d rather not spread it around beyond this committee for the time being.”
Iris’s brows furrow. “You’re taking rather a lot on your shoulders, aren’t you?”
“I’m only doing what Angleton would advise.”
Choudhury has spent the past thirty seconds or so looking hurt and offended. Now he collects his dignity: “This can’t possibly be right—Oversight don’t get their movement reports wrong. Perhaps you were taken in by an impostor? I assure you, you didn’t see Panin last night—he was in Madrid.”
I am getting tired of this shit. “According to your Sitrep he was sighted in Madrid at four p.m.,” I point out. “That’s plenty of time to catch a flight into London City and accost me outside the front door at a quarter past eight. If you had bothered to check the duty rota behind that sighting”—gosh, I didn’t know he could turn that shade of pink!—“you’d know that the Madrid office files their report at five, local time, which is sixteen hundred hours on British Summer Time, and they go home at six. And if you got out from behind your desk once in a while you’d know that the Madrid office consists of two cotton tops and their pet chihuahua, whose job is to take whatever the Guardia Civil feeds them and barf it over the wire on demand, rather than actually running surveillance boxes on visiting opposition controllers. Like I said: the pub CCTV—not to mention the MAGINOT BLUE STARS network and Panin’s mobile phone company’s logfiles—will back me up on this. I’m right, you’re wrong, and I would appreciate it if you’d stop acting like a complete prat and pay attention.”
I find that during my little rant I must have stood up: I’m leaning over the table, balanced on my fists, and Choudhury is leaning over backwards in his chair, not balanced in the slightest. “This is harassment!” he splutters. “Intimidation!”
“No.” I sit down hastily, before Iris can get a word in: “Intimidation is when you’re boxed by a Thirteenth Directorate officer and two Spetsnaz thugs he borrowed from the embassy. I’d recommend it sometime: it’ll be good practice for when the Auditors decide to rake you over the coals.”
Shona has been bottling it up for some time, and now she lets rip: “Bob, what exactly did Panin want? I think you’d better make a full statement right now.” That’s right, she’s with Oscar-Oscar, same as Jo, isn’t she?
“Panin tried to pump me; I don’t pump easily. His specific concern is Teapot. The Teapot is missing, he told me: You’d better find it before the wrong people get their hands on it and use it to make tea. There was a lot of tap-dancing, but that’s the basic substance of it.” I carefully avoid thinking about our inconclusive exchange on the topic of Amsterdam, which is now looking even murkier in context: They do that, you know. To muddy the waters. (Fucking cultists.) “He offered to trade, if we have anything to offer.”
“Wonderful.” Shona is making notes. “So that’s it?”
“Substantially, yes.” Because all I know for sure about the cultist connection is inference—and Angleton’s instructions. (Thus do we damn ourselves, by the treachery of our own words.)
“Okay, I’ll compile this and add it to the minutes, so at least we’ve got it on paper somewhere. That should cover you. Then we can decide how
and when to send it up the chain.” She stares at me blackly. “I assume that’s why you brought it up here?”
“Yes. I want to keep it confidential to the BLOODY BARON committee for now. I’m worried about how Panin knew who to talk to and where to find him. Not to mention when.”
Iris speaks up: “Yes, that’s very disturbing.” She looks appropriately disturbed for a split second, then flexes her management muscle. “Vikram, would you be a dear and make sure to accidentally lose the minutes of this session between your desk and your email program? I think it wouldn’t hurt for distribution to be delayed for a few days, until the situation settles one way or the other.”
Despite the aging biker chick style that she affects, the temperament and training of a steely home-counties matron lurk not too far under the skin; put her in twinset and pearls and you can see her biting the heads off hunt saboteurs. When she turns the big guns on Choudhury he runs up the white flag at once. “Ah, certainly, madam.” He spares me a poisonous glance, which I ignore. “SSO 3 Howard’s unfortunate encounter will be thoroughly misfiled until I hear otherwise.”
“Do you expect Panin to make contact again?” Shona demands. “In your personal judgment.”
“Um.” Now that’s a question and a half. “He left me a card in case I want to contact him, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I got the impression he was worried about timing. If the Thirteenth Directorate are running to some kind of schedule we need to know, don’t we?”
Iris looks grimly pleased. “Minute that.”
“Schedules.” Shona stares at Vikram. “What does the calendar have for us?”
The Fuller Memorandum Page 17