Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  After wasting a couple of hours spinning her wheels without achieving anything significant, Eve finally admitted that she could no longer stomach the gnawing sense of dread. By then it was five o’clock. At ground level, in the world outside her hermetically sealed office, the shadows were lengthening towards full dark. She pushed a button on her phone. “Hold all my calls,” she ordered. Then she pushed another button. She had to rack her memory to dredge up her latest Gammon’s name: “Mister Franke, meet me in the front hall in twenty minutes. Close protection, probably until the early hours of the morning, rough company expected. Dress code is white tie and tails.”

  Franke was cut from a different cloth to her regular run of Gammons. Eve had gone to great lengths to hire him, some of them extremely questionable. Diverting and editing his resumé so that HR wouldn’t notice his professional pedigree was the least of it. She’d had to intercept and edit his criminal background check, to ensure the war crimes indictments and the Interpol Red Notice didn’t cause any hang-ups. She’d also leaned on Mandy in Payroll to falsify his pay grade, in order to offer him sufficient incentive to sign on. Franke was considerably pricier than the old Gammon: in fact, he was paid about eight times as much as Eve herself. On the other hand, Eve thought, when you pay peanuts you get monkeys. So she’d gone out of her way to hire a silverback gorilla who punched in the same weight class as the Bond.

  She hung up, removed her headset, and took the lift up to her bedroom to collect necessities for the expedition. She exchanged her suit for a maxi dress worn under a black woolen coat and broad-brimmed hat, swapped her office heels for a pair of comfortable boots she could run in, and worked her hands into kidskin gloves. Finally she filled her coat pockets: a bag of small glass marbles in one pocket, and a cutthroat razor in the other.

  The game’s afoot.

  She had little difficulty locating Imp. All cellphones in the vicinity of Rupe’s residence were monitored, their calls intercepted via an IMSI-catcher. When Imp had visited, the security system took a good sniff at his smartphone, then—because Rupe was an unscrupulous shitheel who gave two-thirteenths of a flying fuck about anyone else’s privacy—dropped a tracking bug on it via a corrupt SMS configuration update. Now Eve could stalk Imp on Google Maps, which she used to confirm that right now he was at home.

  When she strode into the front hall of Chez Bigge, coat swinging and pocket jingling with thirty pieces of silver from the numismatist, the Gammon was already waiting. “Ma’am.” He was in his penguin suit—when Rupe went posh for an evening’s party, everybody else suffered in livery for his vanity—and he was packing heat, as usual. He looked like an extra from a steampunk remake of The Matrix: his stubby black UMP9 submachine gun was barely concealed by his caped overcoat, and she was fairly sure that was only the most obvious of his weapons.

  “You’ll need a top hat as well,” she told him.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll just be a second.” He vanished into the cloakroom then reappeared suitably en-hatted. “Ready ma’am.” His expression was professionally incurious.

  “We’re going to visit my brother and his playmates in Kensington. Then I’ll be taking a trip with them. Walking tour, not driving.” She waited impatiently for him to open the front door for her. “Rules of engagement: don’t start trouble, but expect it and be prepared to put an end to it.” She paused. “My brother and his friends are presumed friendly. Anyone else we encounter is a potential hostile.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Franke closed the door and trailed her, imposing in black. The chilly night air was invigorating. Eve fell back a step and took hold of her bodyguard’s left arm. “Practice leading me,” she said through tight lips. “Understand that this is not an invitation to take liberties.”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am.” A pause. “May I ask why?”

  “We’ll be visiting a rough neighborhood. Unaccompanied women may be seen as fair game there. If we appear to be together, it will reduce the likelihood of blood being shed.” Her smile was as sharp as her razor. “Theirs, not mine.”

  The Gammon was sufficiently well trained not to comment on their nighttime walk through the quiet affluence of Kensington and Chelsea. Even on the side-streets houses passed hands for tens of millions of pounds and every other parked car was a Range Rover or Mercedes (with a sprinkling of Maseratis and Jaguars to leaven the stodgy mix). She could almost hear his thoughts: Some rough.

  “This isn’t our final destination,” she said softly, then led him towards a crossing. “Nor is this.”

  The houses on the road they entered were bigger and set back behind hedges and fences, with padlocked chains securing their gates and no sign of inhabitation. There were no parked cars and little passing foot traffic. It was a city of the dead in the heart of the capital, a mausoleum occupied by the decaying sarcophagi of the rich and powerful. She felt the ex-soldier’s shoulders tensing, noticed the bunch and play of muscles as he scanned their surroundings.

  There was a brooding presence at the end of the street. Eve could feel it all the way from the corner, the immanent menace of her family’s original sin. It was alive with magic. She doubted the Gammon could sense it; he was alert for more material threats.

  Her dog was buried in an unmarked grave in the front garden, a canine gatekeeper’s soul pinned before the entrance to Neverland. The first time she’d visited this place she’d been nineteen. Dad had brought her—carrying Nono’s ashes in a cardboard box—furtively sneaking under cover of darkness while the last human owners were on holiday. Imp had been too young, Mum already soul-lost to a narrow pursuit of redemption for unspecified sins, and Dad had needed a second set of hands to pass him the chalice while he burned runes into the front lawn using paraquat mixed with canine blood. Nono had been the last of a long line of family Cerberi and Eve still missed that dog, although she’d been old and graying around the muzzle when the cancer took her.

  Shaking off childhood memories, Eve approached the front gate. It was chained and padlocked shut, but the lock yielded to her mind’s touch with well-oiled ease. It was almost like coming home. She beckoned the Gammon after her, although she didn’t expect any problems at the front door. “I’ll enter first,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Eve took the tarnished brass doorknocker and rapped, hard, three times. The hollow boom brought no response. She waited patiently, then tried again. This time, receiving no answer, she touched the keyhole and extended her will again. All the practice time with the coffee mugs paid off: the cylinder turned and the door creaked open as she pushed. Eve stepped into shadows cast by the moonlight flooding through the window above the door.

  “Jeremy?” She called sweetly: “It’s your sister Evie! Girls and boys come out to play?” It was a childhood passphrase, as out of place in the darkened lobby as the red dot from the Gammon’s laser scope, flickering and dancing the tinkerbell waltz as he probed the treads of the grand staircase.

  A glance over her shoulder told her that her bodyguard was perturbed. “Nobody home,” she mouthed. Which was a bad sign. Why had Imp decided to tackle the ghost roads to Neverland so early? Her ultimatum hadn’t given him much of a choice about doing it tonight but this was precipitous, even by his impulsive and sloppy standards. “I’m going to check these rooms. Rules of engagement apply.”

  The front room was dark and empty. The back room held humming computers, their screen savers blowing endless fractal Escher prints in a perpetual zoom repeated across a row of monitors. A rail at the back confirmed her suspicions. At first she took it for theatrical supplies—but up close, under the glare of her LED flashlight, the quality of stitching was too high, the fabric too worn. This was the real thing, clothes of historic vintage that had somehow come through to the present day intact and unfaded without conservation. Unless they were the output of a crafter obsessed with the sort of outfits her great-great-great-grandmother might have worn.

  “That nails it,” she murmured. A box of safety pins spil
led half-empty at her feet. A laser printer stood beside the gaming PCs that pulsed softly green as a luminous deep-sea jellyfish. And on the output tray sat a document. One glance at it told her all she needed to know. She looked at the Gammon.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “We’re going upstairs,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” A pause just long enough to reveal a blue line in the test strip window: “Is there something I should know?”

  Eve thought fast and hard. It was not a stupid question, and Franke was a far cry from the Gammon who’d disgraced himself in the kitchenware shop. “The house we’re in used to belong to a family of magicians. Not the Paul Daniels kind, the New Management kind.” It was hard to tell by torchlight, but she thought his face paled. “There is a door on the top floor that leads to the ghost roads, paths that lead to other realities and times. The door used to be—should be—closed.” Grandpa painted it shut and sealed it with the bound souls of things best unnamed, to lock away the family guilt when he was forced to move out. “Now it stands open.” She could feel no trace of Nono’s soul: the canine psychopomp was delinquent, or Daddy’s binding had finally dissolved. Perhaps Imp had unwittingly freed her—he’d always had a soft spot for the pooch. She pointed to the map on the printer. “This is a treasure chart leading to a lost artifact. Mr. de Montfort Bigge tasked me with retrieving it. Unfortunately there’s a snag. The people I sent after it have already departed, and I need to catch up with them.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her own copy of the map, another paper printout. It wasn’t safe to trust smartphones or other computing devices in the ghost roads: they were prone to infection by things that didn’t belong in this universe.

  “Are you up for it?” she asked. It should have been a rhetorical question, but you never knew: Eve was not about to walk the road to Neverland with a submachine-gun-toting bodyguard freaking out behind her.

  The Gammon swallowed. “Does the New Management know about this?” he asked.

  “The principle of it? Yes, of course,” she said impatiently. “But as to the specifics—” she made a show of due consideration—“I’m absolutely certain they will have no objection when I seal the portal after our return.” Which was not untruthful, although it omitted so many caveats that it was actively misleading: but Franke knew which way the wind blew, and who signed his paychecks.

  He inclined his head. “I’m in,” he said. “Just try to remember that I can’t protect you against threats I’m unaware of, ma’am. Due warning would be appreciated, if possible.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll explain as we go.” Eve returned to the darkened hallway and paused on the first tread, hand on the banister rail: “But first, tell me what you think you know about Whitechapel in the 1880s.”

  * * *

  Well, isn’t this a party!

  The Bond watched from the bushes as Ms. Starkey and her heavily-armed muscle knocked on the front door of the abandoned house.

  Typical. They’d blundered into his operation just at the worst possible time. He’d arrived on-site right at sunset, all dressed up and ready to dance. Everything he’d need for a night of mayhem and throat-slitting was strapped to his webbing vest. He’d ghosted around the perimeter, checking for concealed alarms, then slithered sideways around the walls, attaching acoustic bugs to the windows. After listening carefully he’d concluded there was nobody in the front, and he’d been scanning the casements with his night-vision scope when the unexpected gate crashers showed up.

  There was clearly something wrong with the rooms behind the windows. As he changed angles, the perspective lines on walls and ceiling shifted weirdly, and the back walls showed an uneven pattern of heat traces. Meanwhile, everything in front was cold and chilly. It was like a hunter’s blind, built inside the house to conceal the true interior. The placement was all wrong for it to be a sniper’s nest—you couldn’t even see the street from the front of the building. So perhaps it was a shelter for those being sought, the actual opposite of a hunter’s blind? Very interesting.

  Ms. Starkey knocked on the door a second time, then did something he couldn’t see, concealed by her body. The door squealed open and she stepped inside, followed by her bodyguard. The door closed. After a few seconds the heat pattern on the back wall of the front room changed, brightening. Gotcha, thought the Bond. A short while later it dimmed. He wished he’d had the time to install surface-penetrating radar; but no matter.

  The Bond exfiltrated the garden, donning his trench coat for urban camouflage, and crossed the street to his car. He climbed inside and shut the door, then tapped his headset. “Okay Google, call the boss.” He sat up attentively as the satellite phone rang. “Sir.”

  Rupert was somewhere overseas, or maybe pigging out on blow with a pro domme aboard his private jet. It took him several seconds to reply, and his voice sounded as if it was echoing down a stainless steel drainpipe: “What have you got for me, Mr. Bond?”

  The Bond described his findings at Maison Imp, then added, “Ten minutes ago Ms. Starkey entered, with her assigned bodyguard. They went inside and haven’t come out. Permission to follow, sir?”

  “Granted. Keep to a watching brief for now.” Rupert paused. “I’m emailing a route map to you. It’s the directions Ms. Starkey and her operators are following. Be aware—” Rupert always adopted a pompous fake-professional manner when he wanted to feel in control of events a long way away—“once you pass through the door on the top floor, you’ll be outside the walls of our waking world. The target is hidden inside a dream of late nineteenth-century London. If you can contrive for Ms. Starkey’s subcontractors to remain there when she returns with the book that would be ideal. Otherwise we can tie the loose ends up afterwards, what?”

  “Sir, watching brief is first priority. Ensure unimpeded return of Ms. Starkey and the book she’s collecting, subcontractors optional but can be dealt with later. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes: you are to be the last one in and the last one out. If anyone follows you through the gate in either direction, kill them.”

  “Understood and will comply, sir.”

  “Jolly good, double-oh seven. Rupert out.”

  Shaking his head, the Bond levered himself out of his Kevlar bucket seat and went around to open the cramped boot of the supercar. Reaching inside, he opened the gun safe and removed a pair of Glock 18s and loaded them with 33-round extended magazines, then hooked their holsters to his vest.

  By the time he’d finished arming up, a quarter of an hour had passed since Eve entered the mansion. That was sufficient, in his judgment. He checked the email that Rupert had sent while he was loading his weapons, rapidly skimmed the high points, and pocketed his ruggedized phone. Then he locked the car and headed for the front door.

  * * *

  Even the best laid plans of elite operators can come to grief on the shoals of what-the-fuck. Rupert’s mistake had been to assume that Bernard was an honest broker who’d stay bought and do as he was told. Eve’s mistake was to trust her subcontractors—not Imp, but Andrei, who was being paid well to deal with the rival interloper bidder who Rupert’s boasting had snagged and Bernard’s treachery had invited in. And in the case of the Bond his mistake was to pursue his mission speedily and efficiently, confident in his ability to deal with whatever circumstances threw at him.

  Perhaps he should have been more cautious.

  As he closed the front door behind him, an unmarked white Transit van slowly cruised along the street. The only visible occupant up front was the driver, but crouched inside the windowless rear were six passengers, all wiry men with close-cropped hair. They wore dark suits of archaic cut, worn with long overcoats and bowler hats.

  One of them spoke on the phone, in Russian with a heavy Ukrainian accent. “—Yes, Andrei, is all in hand. What you say? Yes, I see—” He broke off to address the driver through a slot in the plywood front wall of the cargo compartment—“Do you see it? Do you see it?”

  “Da.”
The van slowed, then began to pull in. “Hey, I see Aston Martin. Is area clear?”

  “I see it. Andrei, we are on target—we talk more later.” The speaker hung up, then looked at his men. “All right, what you wait for? Out! Out! We got a job to do!”

  The rear door opened, and the bowler-hatted ex-Spetsnaz crew piled out, suppressed AK-12s at the ready—a modernized, more accurate, more reliable descendant of the venerable AK-47. Despite resembling a heavily armed funeral cortege, they moved speedily into position around the building. Two of them—the leader with the satellite phone, and a demolition specialist—slipped through the gate, leaving the severed ends of the chain behind. The van inched into the driveway leading to the house, then turned and reversed up to the front door. Everyone donned respirator masks and latex gloves, then two of the soldiers disappeared around the back; the others readied compact gas cylinders and ran through the checklist for a forced entry with knockout gas.

  They had a kill order for the Bond: shoot on sight. Ms. Starkey’s bodyguard would be dealt with similarly. Random squatters could also be disposed of at will. But their employer hadn’t quite grasped that Evelyn Starkey was not simply Rupert’s sexy blonde piece of fluff but a player in her own right—and this was a fatal mistake.

  Shadows gathered.

  Alexei Popov from Novosibirsk, the team leader, was a former Spetsnaz sergeant. He’d worked on English soil before, back when he’d been part of a team seconded to the KGB’s occult operations directorate. Vassily Panin, the operative in charge, had his head handed to him by the British security services. It spread a pall over everyone’s career—those who survived. Now he’d been out of the army for most of a decade. Working on special projects for Andrei was okay. It paid really well, you didn’t have to wear a uniform (unless you counted disguises like the ones for tonight’s operation), you didn’t need to salute every asshole in epaulettes you ran across (unless they were Andrei’s shadowy employer: people who didn’t kiss his ass tended to disappear), and every so often you got to kill scumbags who had it coming to them.