The Fuller Memorandum

by Charles Stross

  MO LISTENS TO HER PHONE IN DISBELIEF . “THEY WHAT ? ” SHE demands.

  “They left the paper clip attached to a book in Putney Library,” says Angleton, with icy dignity. “A copy of Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski.”

  “Then you’ve lost him.”

  “Unless you have any better ideas.”

  “Let me get back to you on that.” She snaps her phone closed and glances across the table. An idea is taking hold.

  “Who was that?” asks Panin. “If you do not mind ...”

  “It was Angleton. The memorandum is still missing. The enemy identified his tracer and neutralized it.”

  “You have my sympathies.”

  “Hmm. Do you have a car? Because if so, I’d appreciate a lift home. If you don’t mind.”

  Ten minutes later, the black BMW with diplomatic plates is slowly winding its way between traffic-calming measures. Mo leans back, holding her violin case, and closes her eyes. It’s a big car, but it feels small, with the driver and a bodyguard up front, and Panin sitting beside her in the back.

  “Do you have anything in mind?” Panin asks quietly.

  “Yes.” She doesn’t open her eyes. “Angleton drew a blank, trying to trace the missing document. But that’s not the only asset the cultists have got their hands on.”

  “Your husband.” Panin’s nostrils flare. “Do you have a tracer on him, by any chance?”

  “No.” She doesn’t bother to explain that Laundry operatives don’t routinely carry bugs because what one party can track, others may pick up. “However, he has a mobile phone.”

  “They’ll have switched it off, or discarded it.”

  “The former, I hope. If so, I can trace that.” The shiny, beetle-black car double-parks outside a nondescript row of terrace houses. “Please wait. I’ll only be a minute,” she adds as she climbs out.

  Ninety seconds later she’s back, her go-bag weighing slightly more heavily on her shoulder. “Laptop,” she explains.

  “Your superiors let you take classified documents home?” Panin raises an eyebrow.

  “No. It’s his personal one. He paired it with his phone. Which is also a personal device.” She belts herself in, then opens the laptop screen. “All right, let’s see.” She slides a thumb drive into the machine, rubs her thumb over a window in it: “Now this is a secured memory stick, loaded with execute-in-place utilities. Nothing exotic, mind you, strictly functional stuff. Ah, yes. At the end of the road, turn left ...”

  The driver doesn’t speak, but he has no trouble understanding her directions in English. The car heads south, slowly winding its way through the evening streets. Mo busies herself with the laptop, a route finder program, and a small charm on the end of a necklace, which she dangles above the screen: a ward, taken from around her neck. “It’s along here, somewhere,” she says as the car cruises yet another twisting residential street, where large houses are set back behind tall hedges. “Whoa, we’ve gone past it. Okay, pull in here.” She pulls out her phone and speed-dials a number.

  “Yes?” Angleton is alert.

  “I’m in Hazlehurst Road, near Lambeth cemetery, with Nikolai and his driver. Tracking Bob’s personal phone. How soon can you meet me here?”

  “Hold on.” Pause. “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Rolling now. Can you wait?”

  Mo glances sidelong at Panin, who shakes his head slowly. “I don’t think so,” she says. “Nikolai has urgent business elsewhere.” She pulls the door latch, and it swings open with the sluggish momentum of concealed armor plate. She extends one foot to touch the pavement: “I’ll be discreet.”

  “Good-bye, Dr. O’Brien. And good luck.”

  Most of the houses on this road are detached, sitting in pricey splendor on plots of their own, a few down-market Siamese-twin semis lowering the millionaire row tone. It’s London, but upmarket enough that the houses have private drives and garages. Mo walks slowly back along the pavement until she comes level with the hedge outside a semi with a built-in garage, probably dating to the mid-1930s. The ward throbs in her hand as she reluctantly fastens the fine silver chain around her neck and tucks it in. This is the place. She’s sure of it.

  She pulls out her phone, dials again, says, “Number thirty-four,” then puts it away. Then she opens her go-bag and pulls out a pair of goggles. She pulls them on and flicks a switch. Then she stalks around the side of the house.

  There is a bad smell from the drains out back, and the lawn is un-mown. The hedge has not been trimmed: it looms over the over-long grass like the dark and wild beard of the god of neglect. The windows of the house are dark, and not merely because no lights shine within. It’s strangely difficult to see anything inside. Mo stares at the flagstoned patio beneath the French doors through her goggles. They are goggles of good and evil, part of the regular working equipment of the combat epistemologist, and their merciless contrast reveals the stains of an uneasy conscience mixed with the cement that binds the stones: it’s an upmarket Cromwell Street scene, she realizes, her stomach churning. The police forensic teams will be busy here later in the week, as the tabloid reporters buzz round their heads like bluebottles attracted to the rotting cadavers beneath their feet.

  Mo moves farther around the house. A sense of foreboding gathers like static beneath the anvil cloud of a thunderstorm. Her heart is beating overly fast and her palms are clammy. She is certain that Bob’s phone is here, and where goes the phone goes the Bob. But this is not a good place. Suddenly she is acutely aware that she is on her own, the nearest backup ten minutes away.

  Well, then.

  There is a quiet click as she unfastens the latches of her instrument case. Moments later the bow is in her hand, the chinrest clamped between her jaw and shoulder. The case dangles before her chest, two compact speakers exposed. There’s a sticker on the back of the instrument. It reads: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS.

  Mo walks towards the glass doors, on the indistinct shadows behind them, and touches her bow to the strings of the pallid instrument. There is a sound like a ghost’s dying wail as the strings begin to vibrate, blurring and glowing as they slice the air to shreds. “Open,” she says quietly, and as she sounds a chord the glass panes shatter simultaneously and the door frame warps towards her. She advances into the suburban dining room, playing raw and dissonant notes of silence to confront the horrors within.

  THE BMW IS HALF A MILE AWAY WHEN PANIN LEANS FORWARD and taps his driver on the shoulder.

  “Sir?” The driver glances at Panin’s reflection in his mirror.

  A blank business card appears between Panin’s fingertips, twin to one Panin passed to an unwitting contact a couple of days ago. “Track this,” he says.

  “Yes, sir.” The driver reaches back and takes the card, then places it on the dashboard in front of him. It glows faintly in the darkened interior of the car.

  After a moment, they pull over, then the driver performs a U-turn and accelerates. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir ...”

  “Yes?” Panin looks up from the map book on his lap.

  “Do you want me to call for backup?”

  “When we know where we’re going, Dmitry. Patience.”

  “Sir. Shouldn’t you have told . . . ?”

  “The wolf may not bite the hound, but that doesn’t make them friends. I intend to get there first, Dmitry. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

  “Then I shall drive faster. Sir.” The saloon accelerates, heading south.

  “HELLO , BOB, ” SAYS JONQUIL’S MUMMY, A SMILE CRINKLING the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. “Oh dear, what did you do to your arm? Let me have a look at that.” She tuts over the state of Julian’s first-aid—very rough and ready, a wadded-up rugby sock held in place by tubigrip, now black with clotted blood. “You really ought to have taken the week off sick: overwork will be the death of you, you know.”

  “Fuck off!” Fury and pain give way to a mix of disgust and self-contempt. I should have seen this coming.

>   “Do feel free to let it all hang out,” she tells me: “It’s not as if you’ve got anything to lose, is it?”

  Damn Iris. She knows me well enough to get under my skin.

  “You’ve been studying me, haven’t you?”

  “Of course.” She glances over her shoulder. “You. Fetch the first-aid kit at once.” Back to me: “I’m sorry about . . . that.”

  “Does your idiot daughter always go around chopping up strangers when you’re not around?”

  “Yes,” she says calmly. “It runs in the family. I don’t think you have any grounds to complain, given what you did to poor Gareth. Would you like me to take those handcuffs off you? Don’t get any silly ideas about escaping: the guards upstairs will shoot anyone they don’t recognize.”

  “I didn’t do anything to Gareth,” I say as she pulls out a key and holds it up in front of me between two black-gloved fingers: “If he hadn’t meddled—” I stop. There’s no point arguing. “What do you want from me?”

  “Your cooperation, for the time being. Nothing more, nothing less.” There’s a click, and my right wrist flops free. My arm flares for a moment, and I nearly black out. “That looks painful. Would you like something for it?” I don’t remember nodding, but a subjective moment later I’m sitting up on the trolley and someone I can’t see is leaning over me with a syringe. It stings, cold as it goes in—then my arm begins to fade, startlingly fast. “It’s just morphine, Bob. Say if you need some more.”

  “Morph—” I’m nodding. “What do you want?”

  “Come and sit with me,” she says, beckoning. An unseen minion lifts me with an arm under my left shoulder and guides me towards one of two reclining leather armchairs in the middle of a dim pool of light on the flagstones—Flagstones? Where are we? “And I’ll explain.”

  I fade in and out for a bit. When I’m back again, I find I’m sitting in one of the chairs. There’s a tight bandage on my right arm, with something that isn’t a rugby sock under it. My hands are lying on the armrests, un-cuffed, although I’ve got sore red bands where the metal cut into my wrists. I can feel my fingers, mostly—I can even make them flex. And for the first time in hours, my arm isn’t killing me. I’m aware of the pain, but it feels as if it’s on the other side of a thick woolen blanket.

  Iris is sitting in the other chair, holding an oddly shaped cup made of what looks like yellow plastic, watching me. She’s put her hair up and changed from her usual office casual into what my finely-tuned fashion sense suggests is either a late-Victorian mourning gown or a cultist priestess’s robes. Or maybe she’s just come from a goth nightclub with a really strict dress code.

  I stare past her. We’re in a cellar, sure enough—one designed by an architect from the C of E school of baroque cathedral design. It’s all vaulted arches and flying buttresses, carved stone and heavy wooden partitions cutting us off from darkened naves and tunnels. Just like being in church, except for the lack of windows. Putti and angels flutter towards the shadowy ceiling. There are rows of oak pews, blackened with age. “Where are we?” I ask.

  “We’re in the underground chapel of the Ancient and Honourable Order of Wheelwrights,” she says. “They had an overground chapel, too, but this one is more private.”

  “More p—” I stop. “Were the ancient whatevers a cover organization by any chance? For a brotherhood of a different hue?”

  Iris seems amused by the idea. “Hardly! They were purged in the 1890s, but nobody found the way down to this cellar. We had rather a lot of cleaning up to do, interminable reconsecrations and exorcisms before we could dedicate the chapel to its true calling.” She pulls a face. “Skull worshipers.”

  Skull worshipers? Does she mean . . . ? Oh dear. There are as many species of cultists as there are dark entities for them to wank over. If this place has a history of uncanny worship going back a century and a half, then it’s a place of power indeed—and that’s before you take into account its location inside a huge graveyard, at one end of a ley line leading into the heart of London that was traversed by tens of thousands of dead over a period of nearly a hundred years. The whole thing has got to be a gigantic necromantic capacitor. “So it was vacant and your people moved in?”

  “More or less, yes.”

  “You people being, hmm. Officially, the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom? Or unofficially . . . ?”

  She shakes her head. “The Free Church aren’t terribly useful over here—the British aversion to wearing one’s religion on one’s sleeve, you know. We’d get lots of very funny looks indeed if we went around fondling snakes and preaching the prosperity gospel—even though that sort of thing is de rigueur for stockbrokers. No: on this side of the pond we mostly use local Conservative and Unionist Party branches. And some Labour groups, we’re not fussy.”

  Enlightenment dawns, and it’s not welcome. Firstly, the Tory grass-roots are notorious for their bloody-minded independence—their local branches pretty much run themselves. And secondly, political leverage . . . Isn’t the Prime Minister very big on community and faith-based initiatives? Oh dear fucking hell . . .

  I blink owlishly. Iris leans forward, concerned. “Would you like a can of Red Bull? I’m sure you could do with a pick-me-up.”

  I nod, speechless. “Why me?” I ask, as a male minion—wearing a long black robe, naturally—sweeps forward with a small silver tray, on which is balanced a can of energy drink. I stare at it and twitch my right hand. He opens the ring-pull and holds the tray in front of my (functioning) left hand. I take the can gratefully, and manage to get most of a mouthful down my throat rather than down my tee shirt. As he steps back, I repeat my question: “Why did you abduct me? Because I’m quite clear now that this little charade is all about me. We’ve all been suckered. Iris is one of the two sharpest managers I’ve ever had—the other being Angleton—and she’s been one step ahead of us all along. She probably swiped Mo’s report, too. “Why? I’m a nobody.”

  “You underestimate your value, Bob.” She raises her cup, and smiles over its rim as she takes a sip of something dark. I blink, focusing on it. (That’s not a cup, I realize with a sense of detachment. Why is she drinking from a—because she’s a cultist, idiot.) “You’ve been fast-tracked for senior management for the past eight years. You knew that, didn’t you? But you’re only graded as an SSO 3. That’s a bit low for someone who’s reporting directly to a DSS, so I did some digging. You’re not being held back; it’s just that the Laundry operates a Y-shaped promotion path—administration and line ranks diverge above a very low level. You’re due for regrading later this year, Bob. If you pass the board, they’ll make you an SSO 4(L). Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the first step up from the fork into the line hierarchy, and it’ll entitle you to boss Army majors around. Or police superintendents. I’m an SSO 6(A) but you’d be able to tell me what to do. And a year after that, unless you really go off the rails, they’ll be coaching you for SSO 5(L).”

  I try not to boggle openly. I haven’t been paying too much attention to my grade, frankly: I get regular yearly pay raises and rung increments, and I knew I was up for promotion sooner or later, and I knew about the Y-path, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I might be about to effectively jump three grades.

  “I’ve seen your confidential record, Bob. It’s impressive. You get stuff done, and Angleton thinks very highly of you. Angleton. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  I nod. My mouth is dry and I feel my pulse fluttering. “You didn’t infiltrate the Laundry just to get close to me. Did you?”

  She chuckles. “No, Bob, we didn’t.” We. Oh holy fuck. There’s more than one cultist infiltrator in the Laundry? I swallow. “But I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time. You’re on track for executive rank when the stars come right. You lucky, lucky man.” Her voice drops to a low croon as she raises the baby’s skull and drains it, then holds it out for a refill. “It won’t work, of course.”

  “It won’t—excuse me?”

/>   “Everything.” She shrugs. The effect is rather fetching, if you have a goth fixation. “Go on, tell me what you think is coming up next.”

  Oh hell. “This is the point,” I say guardedly, “where the evil cultist monologues at the captive agent and tries to convert him to her way of thinking. It never works. Does it?”

  Iris shakes her head. “You’re probably right, but I ought to give it a go. Okay, here’s my pitch. If I thought for a moment that official policy as set forth in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN stood a chance of success—if it was remotely possible that we, the human species, could stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the elder ones and build a shield against our Dark Emperor, do you think for a split second that I wouldn’t go for it?” She looks at me speculatively. “You know just how high the odds are stacked against us. There are just too damned many people—we’re damaging the structure of reality by over-observing it! And we can’t kill them either, not without releasing a pulse of necromantic energy that will have every brain eater for a thousand lightyears in all directions homing in on us. The latest research”—she bites her lower lip—“it means the breakthrough is inevitable, and soon. The dead things quicken, and the harder we fight against the inevitable, the worse it will be.”

  She falls silent. Despondent? Or resigned?

  “What you’re saying is, if rape is inevitable, lie back and try to enjoy it. Right?”

  She glares at me, blood in her eye for an instant: “No! I’m not into, into enjoying this. I’m interested in survival, Bob, in reaching an accommodation. Survival at all costs and ensuring the continuity of the human race, that’s what the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh is about these days. I won’t lie to you by denying that our history is ghastly, but we change with the times. Our goal is actually your goal, if you think about it for a moment.”

  Which, for me, is an Oh hell statement with brass bells on. It’s not as if I haven’t had my quiet nagging doubts about the Laundry’s methods and goals, and its intermittent self-thwarting tendency to substitute circular arse-kicking routines for progress. Iris is goddamn good at what she does. Wasn’t I thinking earlier that I’d follow her to hell if—