The Atrocity Archives (12 page)

"Oops, sorry," says Pinky, and closes the door.

He's waiting on the landing when I finish in the
bathroom; we studiously avoid each other's eyes. "Uh, it's okay to go
into your room," he volunteers. "She's gone out."

"Oh good."

He hurries after me as I head downstairs. "She
asked me to have a word with you," he calls breathlessly.

"That's fine," I say distantly. "Just as long as
she isn't asking you to share my bed."

"She says you need to check out the
alt.polyamory FAQ," he says, and cringes.

I switch the kettle on and sit down. "Do you
really think
I
have a problem?" I ask. "Or does
Mhari
have a problem?"

He glances around, trapped. "You have
incompatible lifestyle choices?" he ventures.

The kettle hisses like an angry snake. "Very
good. Incompatible lifestyle choices is such a fucking
civilised
way of putting it."

"Bob, do you think she might be doing this to
get your attention?"

"There are good ways and bad ways to get my
attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention,
sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger."
I
pour more hot water into my mug of tea, then stand up and rummage in
the cupboard.
Ah, it's right where I left it.
I upend a
generous dollop of Wray and Nephew's overproof Jamaican rum into the
mug and sniff: brown sugar crossed with white lightning. "The male ego
is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's
extremely brittle. Drink?"

Pinky sits down opposite me, looking as if he's
sharing the kitchen table with an unexploded bomb. "Why not look on the
bright side?" he says, holding out a Coke glass for the rum.

"There's a bright side?"

"She keeps coming back to you," he says. "Maybe
she's doing it to hurt herself?"

"To—" I bite off the snide reply I was working
on. When Mhari gets depressed she gets
depressed:
I've seen the
scars. "I'll have to think about that one," I say.

"Well, then." Pinky looks pleased with himself. "Doesn't that look
better? She's doing it because she's depressed and
hates herself, not because there's anything wrong with you. It's not a
reflection on
your
virile manhood, you big hunk of beefcake. Go
get yourself a one nighter of your own and she'll have to make her mind
up what she wants."

"Is that in the FAQ?" I ask.

"I dunno; I don't pay much attention to breeder
reproductive rituals," he says, fingering his moustache.

"Thank you, Pinky," I say heavily. He does a
little wave and bow, then tips the contents of his glass down his
throat. I spend the next minute or two helping save him from choking,
and then we have another wee dram. The rest of the afternoon becomes a
blur, but when I wake up in bed the next morning I have a stunning
hangover, a vague memory of drunkenly talking things over with Mhari
for hours on end until it blew up into a flaming row, and I'm on my own.

Situation normal: all fucked up.

Two days later, I am booked
into an Orientation and Objectivity seminar at the Dustbin. Only
God and Bridget—and possibly Boris, though he won't say anything—know
why
I'm booked into an O&O course three days after getting off the
plane, but something dire will probably happen if I don't turn up.

The Dustbin isn't part of the Laundry, it's
regular civil service, so I try to dig up a shirt that isn't too
crumpled, and a tie. I own two ties—a Wile E. Coyote tie, and a
Mandelbrot set tie that's particularly effective at inducing
migraines—and a sports jacket that's going a bit threadbare at the
cuffs. Don't want to look too out of place, do
I? Someone might ask questions, and after the
auto-da-fé
I've
just been through I do not want anyone mentioning my name in Bridget's
vicinity for the next year. I'm halfway to the tube station before I
remember that I forgot to shave, and I'm on the train before I notice
that I'm wearing odd socks, one brown and one black. But what the hell,
I made the effort; if I actually owned a suit I'd be wearing it.

The Dustbin is our name for a large, ornate
postmodernist pile on the south bank of the Thames, with green glass
curtain walls and a big, airy atrium and potted Swiss cheese plants
everywhere there isn't a security camera. The Dustbin is occupied by a
bureaucratic organisation famous for its three-hour lunches and
impressive history of KGB alumni. This organisation is persistently and
mistakenly referred to as MI5 by the popular media. As anyone in the
business knows, MI5 was renamed DI5 about thirty years ago; like those
Soviet-era maps that misplaced cities by about fifty miles in order to
throw American bombers off course, DI5 is helpfully misnamed in order
to direct freedom of information requests to the wrong address. (As it
happens there
is
an organisation called MI5; it's in charge of
ensuring that municipal waste collection contracts are outsourced to
private bidders in a fair and legal manner. So when your Freedom of
Information Act writ comes back saying they know nothing about you,
they're telling the truth.)

The Dustbin cost approximately two hundred
million pounds to construct, has a wonderful view of the Thames and the
Houses of Parliament, and is full of rubbish that smells. Whereas we
loyal servants of the crown and defenders of the human race against
nameless gibbering horrors from beyond spacetime have to labour on in a
Victorian rookery of cabbage-coloured plasterboard walls and wheezing
steam pipes somewhere in Hackney. That's because the Laundry used to be
part of an organisation called SOE—indeed, the Laundry is the sole
division of SOE to have survived the bureaucratic
postwar bloodletting of 1945—and the mutual loathing between SIS (aka
DI6) and SOE is of legendary proportions.

I turn up at the Dustbin and enter via the
tradesman's entrance, a windowless door in a fake-marble tunnel near
the waterfront. A secretary who looks like she's made of fine bone
china waves me through the biometric scanner, somehow manages to
refrain from inhaling in my presence (you'd think I hailed from the
Pestilence Division at Porton Down), and finally ushers me into a small
cubicle furnished with a hard wooden bench (presumably to make me feel
at home). The inner door opens and a big, short-haired guy in a white
shirt and black tie clears his throat and says, "Robert Howard, this
way please." I follow him and he drops one of those silly badge-chains
over my head then pushes me through a metal detector and gives me a
cursory going over with a wand, airport security style. I grit my
teeth. They know exactly who I am and who I work for: they're just
doing this to make a point.

He relieves me of my Leatherman multitool, my
palmtop computer, my Maglite torch and pocket screwdriver set, the
nifty folding keyboard, the MP3 walkman, the mobile phone, and a
digital multimeter and patch cable set I'd forgotten about. "What's all
this, then?" he asks.

"Do you guys ever go anywhere without your
warrant card and handcuffs? Same difference."

"I'll give you a receipt for these," he says
disapprovingly, and shoves them in a locker. "Stand on this side of the
red line for now." I stand. Something about him makes my built-in
police detector peg out; Special Branch acting as uniformed
commissionaires?
Yeah, right.
"Present this on your way out to
collect your stuff. You may now cross the red line. Follow me, do not,
repeat
not
, open any closed doors or enter any areas where a
red light is showing, and don't speak to anyone without my say-so."

I follow my minder through a maze of twisty
little cubicle farms, all alike, then up three floors by elevator, then
down a corridor where the Swiss cheese plants are
turning yellow at the edges from lack of daylight, and finally to the
door of what looks like a classroom. "You can talk now; everyone else
in this class is cleared to at least your level," he says. "I'll come
collect you at fifteen hundred hours. Meanwhile, go anywhere you want
on this level—there's a canteen where you'll have lunch, toilet's
round
that corner there—but don't leave this floor under any circumstances."

"What if there's a fire?" I ask.

He looks at me witheringly: "We'd arrest it.
I'll see you at three o'clock," he says. "And not before."

I enter the classroom, wondering if teacher is
in yet.

"Ah, Bob, nice to see you. Have a seat. Hope you
found us okay?"

I get a sinking feeling: it's Nick the Beard. "I'm fine, Nick," I
say. "How's Cheltenham?" Nick is some sort of
technical officer from CESG, based out at Cheltenham along with the
other wiretap folks. He drops round the Laundry every so often to make
sure all our software is licensed and we're only running validated COTS
software purchased via approved suppliers. Which is why, whenever we
get word that he's about to visit, I have to run around rebooting
servers like crazy and loading the padded-cell environments we keep
around purely to placate CESG so they don't blacklist our IT processes
and get our budget lopped off at the knees. Despite that, Nick is
basically okay, which is why I get the sinking feeling; I don't enjoy
treating nice guys like they're agents of Satan or Microsoft salesmen.

"They moved me out of the hole on the map two
months ago," he says. "I'm based here full-time now. Miriam's got a
job
in the city, so we're thinking of moving. Have you met Sophie? I think
she's running this course today."

"Don't think so. Who else is coming? What do you
know about, um, Sophie? Nobody even showed me a course synopsis; I'm
not sure why I'm here."

"Oh, well then." He rummages in his brief case
and pulls out a sheet of paper, hands it to me:
Orientation
and Objectivity 120.4: Overseas Liaison.

I start reading:
This seminar is intended to
provide inductees with the correct frame of mind for conducting
negotiations with representatives of allied agencies. Common pitfalls
are discussed with a view to inculcating a culture of best practice. A
proactive approach to integrating operational agreements with
extraterritorial parties is deprecated, and correct protocol for
requesting diplomatic assistance is introduced. Status: completion of
this seminar and associated coursework is mandatory for foreign
postings in Category 2 (nonallied) positions.

"Ah, really," I say faintly. "How interesting."
(Thank you, Bridget.)

"All I wanted was to visit the factory that
supplies our PCs out in Taiwan," Nick mutters darkly. "All part of our
ISO certification cycle, assuring that they're following best industry
practices in motherboard assembly and testing … "

The door opens. "Ah, Nick! Nice to see you!
How's Miriam?"

It's a new arrival. He's the very image of a
schoolteacher: a thin, weedy-looking guy with big horn-rimmed
spectacles and thinning hair. Except, when he positively leaps into the
room, he gives the impression of being made of springs. Nick obviously
knows him: "She's fine, fine—and how are you yourself? Uh, Bob, have
you met Alan?"

"Alan?" I stick out a hand tentatively. "With
what department? If I'm allowed to ask?"

"Umm—" He pumps my hand up and down then looks
at me oddly as I nurse my bruised fingertips—he's got a grip like a
vice. "Probably not, but that's okay," he announces. "Let's not get
carried away, eh!" Over his shoulder to Nick: "Hillary's fine, but
she's having a devil of a time with the guns. We're going to need a new
cupboard soon, and the rental in Maastricht is horrible."

Guns?
"Alan and I belong to the same
shooting club," Nick explains diffidently. "With all the fuss a few
years ago we had to either move our guns out of the country to
somewhere where it's legal to own them, or turn them
in. Most of us turned ours in and use the club facilities, but Alan's a
holdout."

"Handguns?"

"No, long arms. That's recreational shooting, by
the way. I'm just an amateur but Alan takes it a bit more
seriously—trained for the Olympics a way back."

"What's the club?" I ask.

"Damned impudent infringement of our civil
rights," Alan huffs. "Not trusting their own citizens to own automatic
weapons: a bad sign. But we do what we can. Artists' Rifles, by the
way. Drop in if you're ever in the neighbourhood, ha ha. So we're just
waiting for Sophie now."

"Could be worse." Nick ambles over to the table
beside the door and prods at what looks like a thermos jug. "Ah,
coffee!" I kick myself mentally for not noticing it first.

"You going anywhere?" asks Alan.

"Just back." I shrug. "Didn't even know this
course existed."

"Business or pleasure?"

"Milk or sugar, Alan?"

"Business. I wish it
had
been pleasure.
They didn't brief me and nothing was the way I expected it—"

"Ha ha. Milk, no sugar. Typical Laundry turf
war, by the sound of it. So your boss's boss's first cousin sent you
for remedial classes, stay late after school, dunce cap in the corner,
the usual rigmarole?"

"That's about it. Hey, pour me one too?"

"Seen it a dozen times before," offers Nick. "Nobody ever thinks to
tell
anyone when they're expected—" I
yawn. "You tired?"

"Still jetlagged, thanks." I blow on my coffee.

The door opens and a woman in a brown tweed
suit—Sophie, I presume—walks in. "Hello, everybody," she says.
"Alan,
Nick—you must be Bob." A brief grin. "Glad you're all here. Today
we're
going to go over some basic material by way of reminding you of the
proper protocol for dealing with foreign agencies
while posted abroad on neutral or friendly but not allied territory."
She plonks a bulging briefcase down on the desk at the front of the
classroom.

"If I can just confirm—all three of you are due
to fly out to California in the next few days, is that right?"