“The calendar? It’s August bank holiday in a couple of weeks—”
“I believe she was asking about significant intersections,” Iris interrupts, sparing me a quelling glance. “Summit conferences, international treaties, Mayan great cycle endings, general elections, prophesied apocalypses, that sort of thing. It’ll be in Outlook under events. You’re the one with the laptop, why don’t you look it up?”
Choudhury manages to look long-suffering. “What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?”
“Anything!” Shona makes a curse of the word. “Whatever might interest Panin.”
I blink. Suddenly a rather unpalatable thought occurs to me. Forget dates that interest Panin: What about dates relevant to the Teapot? Assuming the Teapot in question is the one I’m thinking of.
Trying not to be too obvious about it, I pull out my phone and start hunting. There’s an ebook reader, and a Wikipedia client, and a bunch of other stuff. What was Ungern Sternberg’s adjutant called again . . . ?
“Bob, what are you doing?” It’s Iris.
I grin apologetically. “Checking a different calendar.” 19 August 1921. That’s when the mutineers murdered Teapot. At least, that’s when they said they did the deed. And the ninetieth anniversary is coming up in the next week: How interesting. I quickly scan for other significant anniversaries on that date: Salem witch trial executions, Hungerford massacre, twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR . . . “No, sorry, nothing there,” I say, putting my phone away. Liar, liar, pants on fire.
It’s like this: If you were going to try and break the geas that restrains an extra-dimensional horror called the Eater of Souls, wouldn’t you pick the anniversary of its last taste of freedom? Dates have resonance, after all, and this particular horror has been living quietly among human beings, the lion lying down with the lamb, for so long that our patterns of thought have imprinted upon it.
Isn’t that just the sort of nutso thing that the cultists might be up to? Trying to free a vastly powerful occult force from its Laundry-imposed chains? And isn’t this exactly the sort of thing that Panin might anticipate? Well maybe. There’s a slight motivational gap: Just what makes cultists tick, anyway? Besides the obvious—having your head turned by a hugely powerful glamour, being bound by a geas, that sort of thing—what’s in it for them? Fucked if I know: I mean, what makes your average high school shooter tick, for that matter?
Suddenly, not knowing is making me itch—but the only person who can answer for sure is the one person I don’t dare to ask: Angleton.
“Maybe we could wire Bob?” Shona suggests.
What? I shake my head. “What do you mean?”
“If Panin makes contact again, it would really help if you had a recording angel,” she points out.
“There was a word in that sentence: if.” I look at Iris for support but she’s nodding thoughtfully along with Shona. “Panin’s not going to make contact on working hours, and if it’s all right by you, I’d rather not wear a wire during all my off-duty life. Now, if you want me to use that business card and wear a recorder while we’re talking, that’s another matter. But I think we ought to have something to trade with him before we go there, otherwise he’s not going to give us anything for free.”
“Point,” says Iris.
Vikram looks at me through slitted eyes. “We should wire him anyway,” he suggests maliciously, “just in case.”
I sink back in my chair, racking my brain for plausible defenses. We’ve only been in this meeting for half an hour and already it feels like a decade: what a morning! But it could be worse: I’ve got to run Angleton’s little errand at two o’clock . . .
10.
THE NIGHTMARE STACKS
THERE IS A RAILWAY UNDER LONDON, BUT IT’S PROBABLY NOT the one you’re thinking of.
Scratch that. There are many railways under London. There are the tube lines that everyone knows about, hundreds of kilometers, dozens of lines, carrying millions of people every day. And there are the London commuter rail lines, many of which run underground for part or all of their length. There are the other major railway links such as CrossRail and the Eurostar tunnel into St. Pancras. There’s even the Docklands Light Railway, if you squint.
But these are just the currently operational lines that are open to the public. There are other lines you probably don’t know about. There are the deep tube tunnels that were never opened to the public, built to serve the needs of wartime government. Some of them have been abandoned; others turned into archives and secure stores. There are the special platforms off the public tube stations, the systems built during the 1940s and 1950s to rush MPs and royalty away from the capital at an hour’s notice in time of war. These are the trains of government, buried deep and half-forgotten.
And then there are the weird ones. The Necropolis railway that ran from behind Waterloo to Brookwood cemetery in Surrey, along the converted track bed of which I ran last night. The coal tunnels that distributed fuel to the power stations of South London and the buried generator halls that powered the tube network. And the MailRail narrow-gauge tunnels that for over a century hauled sacks of letters and parcels between Paddington and Whitechapel, until it was officially closed in 2003.
Closed?
Not so fast.
The stacks, where the Laundry keeps its dead files, occupy two hundred-meter stretches of disused deep-dug tube tunnel not far from Whitehall. They’re thirty meters down, beneath the hole in the ground where Service House is currently being rebuilt by a private finance initiative (just in time for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN). How do you think we get files in and out? Or librarians in and out, for that matter?
Angleton has a job for me to do, down in the stacks. And so it is that at one thirty I’m sitting in my office, nursing a lukewarm mug of coffee and waiting for the little man with the handcart to call, when the NecronomiPod begins to vibrate and make a noise like a distressed U-boat.
“’Lo?”
It’s Mo. “Bob?” She doesn’t sound too happy.
“Yeah? You at home?”
“Right now, yes . . . not feeling too well.”
I hunch over instinctively. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes.” Oh, right. “Listen, about last night—thanks. And thanks for letting me lie in. I’m just wrung-out today, so I’ve begged off my weekly and I was thinking about taking the afternoon to do what we talked about earlier, to go visit Research and Development. But there’s a little job I needed to do in the office and I was wondering if you could . . .”
I glance at the clock on my desktop. “Maybe; depends what, I’m off to the stacks in half an hour.”
“The stacks? In person?” She cheers up audibly. “That’s great! I was hoping you could pull a file for me, and if you’re going there—”
“Not so fast.” I pause. “What kind of file?”
“A new one, a report I asked for. I can give you a reference code; it should be fresh in today.”
“Oh, right.” Well, that shouldn’t be a problem—I can probably fit it in with my primary mission. “What’s the number?”
“Let me . . .” She reads out a string of digits and I read it back to her. “Yes, that’s it. If you could just bring it home with you this evening?”
“Remind me again, who was it who didn’t want work brought home?”
“That’s different. This is me being lazy, not you overdoing it!”
I smile. “If you say so.”
“Love you.”
“You too. Bye.”
AT SEVEN MINUTES PAST TWO, I HEAR FOOTSTEPS AND A squeak of wheels that stops outside my door. I pick up a pair of brown manila files I’m through with and stand. “Archive service?” I ask.
The man with the handcart is old and worn before his time. He wears a blue-gray boiler suit and a cloth cap that has seen better days; his skin is as parched as time-stained newsprint. He looks at me with the dumb, vacant eyes of a residual human resource. “Archive service,” he m
umbles.
“These are going back.” I hand over the files, and he painstakingly inscribes their numbers on a battered plywood clipboard using a stub of pencil sellotaped to a length of string. “And I’m going with them.”
He stares at me, unblinking. “Document number,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “Give me that.” Taking the clipboard I make up a shelf reference number and write it down in the next space, then copy it onto my left wrist with a pen. “See? I am a document. Take me.”
“Document . . . number . . .” His eyes cross for a moment: “Come.” He puts his hands to the handcart and begins to push it along, then glances back at me anxiously. “Come?”
For an RHR he’s remarkably communicative. I tag along behind him as he finishes his round, collecting and distributing brown manila envelopes that smell of dust and long-forgotten secrets. We leave the department behind, heading for the service lifts at the back; Rita doesn’t even raise her head to nod as I walk past.
The heavy freight lift takes forever to descend into the subbasement, creaking and clanking. The lights flicker with the harsh edge of fluorescent tubes on the verge of burnout, and the ventilation fans provide a background white buzz of noise that sets my teeth on edge. There’s nobody and nothing down here except for storerooms and supply lockers: people visit, but only the dead stay.
Handcart man shuffles down a narrow passage lined with fire doors. Pausing before one, he produces an antiquated-looking key and unlocks a padlock-and-chain from around the crash bar. Then he pushes his cart through into a dimly lit space beyond.
“How do you re-lock that?” I ask him.
“Lock . . . at night,” he mumbles, throwing a big switch like a circuit breaker that’s mounted on the wall just inside the door.
We’re in a narrow, long room with a couple of handcarts parked along one wall. The other side of the room is strange. There’s a depression in the floor, and a hole in each of the narrow ends: rails run along the depression between the holes. Such is the wildly unusual scale of it all that it takes me several seconds to blink it back into the correct perspective and see that I’m standing on the platform of an underground railway station—a narrow-gauge system with tracks about sixty centimeters apart, and an electrified third rail. I hear a sullen rumbling from one of the tunnel mouths, and feel a warm breath of wind on my face, like the belch of a very small dragon. The original MailRail track only ran east to west, but extensions were planned back in the 1920s; I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find one here, for what else would commend this extremely boring sixties office block to the Laundry as a temporary headquarters?
I look at handcart man. “Can I ride this?” I ask.
Instead of answering, he pulls a second lever. I shrug. You’d think I’d have learned better than to ask zombies complex questions by now, wouldn’t you?
The rumbling builds to a loud roar, and a remarkable object rolls out of the tunnel and screeches to a halt in the middle of the room.
It’s a train, of course—three carriages, all motorized. But it’s tiny. You could park it in my front hall. The roofs of the carriages barely rise waist-high, and they sport external handles. Handcart man shambles to the front carriage and hinges the roof right up. Not even breaking a sweat, he begins to load the files from his cart into a storage bin.
“Hey, what about”—I focus on the second carriage. It’s got wire mesh sides, and what looks like a bench—“me?”
Handcart man lifts a box of files out of the front carriage, deposits it in his cart, and lowers the lid. Then he walks to the second carriage, lifts the roof, and looks at me expectantly.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” I mutter, and climb in. The wooden bench seat is about five centimeters above the track bed, and I have to lean backward as he drops the lid with a clang. The carriage is only big enough for a single passenger. It smells musty and dry, as if something died in here a long time ago.
Turning my head sideways, I watch as handcart man walks over to the big circuit breaker and yanks it down and up, down and up. It must be some kind of trackside signal, because a moment later I feel a motor vibrate under me, and the train starts to roll forward. I make myself lie down: it’d be a really great start to the mission to scrape my face off on the tunnel roof. And a moment later I’m off, rattling feetfirst into the darkness under London, on a false-flag mission . . .
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME I’M FALLING FEETFIRST INTO A PIECE of railway history, another part of the plot is unfolding. Let me try to reconstruct it for you:
A red-haired woman holding a violin case is making her way along a busy high street in London. Wearing understated trousers and a slightly dated Issey Miyake top, sensible shoes, and a leather bag that’s showing its age, she could be a college lecturer or a musician on her way to practice: without the interview suit, nobody’s going to mistake her for an auction house employee or a civil servant. Which shows how deceptive appearances can be.
Kids and shoppers and office workers in suits and shop staff in uniforms move around her; she threads her way between them, not looking in shop windows or diverting her attention from the destination in hand. Here’s a side street, and she turns the corner wide—avoiding a baby buggy, its owner nattering on her mobile—and strides along it before turning into another, wider street at a corner where a bland seventies office rises six stories above the pavement.
The office has glass doors and a reception desk fronting an austere atrium; a bank of lifts behind it promises a rapid ascent into crowded beige cubicle heaven. The woman approaches reception, and holds up an ID card of some sort. The guard nods, signs her in, then waves her on to the lift bank on the right. She could be a session musician turning up at one of the TV production companies listed on the wall panel beside the reception desk, or a member of staff on her way back from a lunchtime lesson.
But she’s not.
The lift control panel shows five numbered floors. As the door slides closed, the woman pushes the third-floor button, then first floor (twice), then the fourth floor. The lift begins to move. The illuminated floor display tracks it up from ground to first, second, third—and it goes out. Then, safely stranded between indicated floors, the doors open.
There are no cubicles here: only rooms with frosted glass doors that lock shut, and red security lights to warn against intrusion. Some of the rooms are offices, and some of them are laboratories, although the experiments that are conducted in them require little equipment more exotic than desktop computers and hand-wired electronic circuitry.
The red-haired woman makes her way through the building with ease born of familiarity, until she finds room 505. She knocks on the door. “Come in,” the occupant calls, his voice muffled somewhat by the wood.
Mo opens the door wide. “Dr. Mike,” she says, smiling.
“Mo?” He has a large head for his average-sized torso: brown hair fighting a hard-bitten retreat, bound in a ponytail; his eyebrows, owlishly peaked, rise quizzically at her approach. “Good to see you!”
“It’s been too long.” She walks in and they embrace briefly. “Are you busy?”
“Not immediately, no.” His desk tells a different story, piled high in untidy snowdrifts of paper—there’s a laser printer on a table in one corner, and a heavy-duty shredder right below it—with a coffee mug balanced atop one particularly steep pile. The mug reads: DURING OFF HOURS TRAINS STOP HERE. There’s a bookcase beside the desk, crammed full of phrase books and travel guides, except for one shelf, which is occupied by a tiny Z-gauge model railway layout. “Were you passing through or can I be of service in some way?”
“I was hoping to talk to you,” she confesses. “About . . .” She shrugs. “Mind if I sit down?”
“It’s the cross-section growth coefficient, isn’t it?” he asks, and one of his eyebrows tries to climb even farther. “Yes, yes, make yourself comfortable. Everyone has been asking about it this week.” He sighs, then backs towards his own chair, bearish on his
short legs.
“I got an edited, probably garbled, version of it from Andy last week,” she explains. “The original paper isn’t on the intranet so I thought I’d ask you about it.” She nods at the door. “In person.”
“Yes . . . very wise.” His expression relaxes moment by moment.
“The scholars of night have been busy.”
“Word leaked.” Saturnine, he rests one hand on a graph-ruled notepad. “Or so I gather from Angleton.”
“That’s interesting.” Mo rests her violin against the side of her chair and crosses her legs. “He’s missing too, you know.”
“That’s very interesting!” Now Ford’s expression lightens. “The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.”
Mo nods. “Footwear and naval architecture I know, but I never could get my head around why you’d put wax in the ceiling. Some kind of late-Victorian loft-space insulation?”
“No, it’s—” Ford stops. “Okay, you won that round. Is this about the paper, or the leak?”
“The paper.” She leans forward expectantly.
“The first rule of paper is, there is no paper—well no, not exactly, but it’s not the kind of result I could punt at Nature, is it?”
“Right. So who reviewed it?”
Ford nods. “That’s the right question. Whose hat are you wearing?” Mo’s eyes go very cold. “There’s a little girl in Amsterdam whose parents don’t have much time for hair-splitting right now. Not that I’m accusing you of playing games, but I need to know. See, I’m conducting some research in applied epistemology. It would be rather unfortunate if you made a mistake in your logic and the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh have gotten themselves worked up over nothing.”
“The Brotherhood? I say, are they still going?” He meets her cold stare with one of his own. “That is simply not on. I rather thought we’d put a stop to their antics in Afghanistan a few years ago.”
The Fuller Memorandum Page 18