The Atrocity Archives (13 page)

Uh-oh.
"I'm just back," I say.

"Oh dear. You've done the 120.4 course before,
then? This is just a refresher?"

I take a deep breath. "I can honestly say that
the fact that this seminar exists is news to both myself and my
immediate supervisors. I think that's why I'm here now."

"Oh well!" She smiles brightly. "We'll soon see
about that. Just as long as your trip was productive and nothing went
wrong! This course is about procedures that should only be necessary in
event of an emergency, after all." She digs into the case and hands us
each a hefty wedge of course notes. "Shall we begin?"

It's been six weeks since I
was certified fit for active duty, and three weeks since I came
back from Santa Cruz in business class with a bandage around my head.
Bridget has had her little joke, I've suffered through about two weeks
of seminars intended to bolt, padlock, and weld shut the stable door in
the wake of the equine departure, and I'm slowly going out of my skull
with boredom.

For my sins I've been posted to a pokey little
office in the Dansey Wing of Service House—little more than a broom
closet off a passageway under the eaves, roof wreathed in hissing steam
pipes painted black for no obvious reason. There's a valuable antique
that Services claims is a computer network server, and when I'm not
nursing it from one nervous breakdown to the next I am expected to file
endless amounts of paperwork and prepare a daily abstract based on
several classified logs and digests that cross my desk. The abstract is
forwarded to some senior executives, then shredded by a guy in a blue
suit. In between, I'm expected to make the tea. I
feel like a twenty-six-year-old office boy. Overqualified, naturally.
To add insult to injury, I have a new job title: Junior Private
Secretary.

I would, I think, be right out of my skull and
halfway down the road by now, chased by men in white coats wielding
oversized butterfly nets, were it not for the fact that the word
"secretary" means something very different from its normal usage in
the
steamy little world of the Laundry. Y'see, before the 1880s, a
secretary was a gentleman's assistant: someone who kept the secrets.
And there are secrets to be kept, here in the Arcana Analysis Section.
In fact, there's a whole bloody wall of filing cabinets full of 'em
right behind my cramped secretarial chair. (Some wag has plastered a
Post-it note on one of the drawers:
THE TRUTH
IS IN HERE, SOMEWHERE
.) I'm
learning things all the time, and apart from the bloody filing work,
not to mention the coffee pot from hell and the network server from
heck, it's mostly okay. Except for Angleton. Did I mention Angleton?

I'm standing in for Angleton's junior private
secretary, who is on sabbatical down at the funny farm or taking a year
out doing an MBA or something. And therein lies my problem.

"Mr. Howard!" That's Angleton, calling me into
the inner sanctum.

I stick my head round his door. "Yes, boss?"

"Enter." I enter. His office is large, but feels
cramped; every wall—it's windowless—is shelved floor-to-ceiling in
ledgers. They're not books, but microfiche binders: each of them
contains as much data as an encyclopaedia. His desk looks merely odd at
first sight, an olive-drab monolith bound with metal strips, supporting
the TV-sized hood of a fiche reader. It's only when you get close
enough to it to see the organlike pedals and the cardhopper on top
that, if you're into computational archaeology, you realise that
Angleton's desk is an incredibly rare, antique Memex—an information
appliance out of 1940s CIA folklore.

Angleton looks up at me as I enter, his face a
blue-lit washout of text projected from the Memex
screen. He's nearly bald, his chin is two sizes two small for his
skull, and his domed scalp gleams like bone. "Ah, Howard," he says.
"Did you find the material I requested?"

"Some of it, boss," I say. "Just a moment." I
duck out into my office and pick up the hulking dusty tomes that I've
carried up from the stacks, two basements and a fifty-metre elevator
ride below ground level. "Here you are.
Wilberforce Tangent
and
Opal Orange.
"

He takes the tomes without comment, opens the
first of them, and starts sliding card-index sized chunks of microfilm
into the Memex input hopper. "That will be all, Howard," he says
superciliously, dismissing me.

I grit my teeth and leave Angleton to his
microfilm. I once made the mistake of asking why he uses such an
antique. He stared at me as if I'd just waved a dead fish under his
nose, then said, "You can't read Van Eck radiation off a microfilm
projector." (Van Eck radiation is the radio noise emitted by a video
display; with sophisticated receivers you can pick it up and eavesdrop
on a computer from a distance.) Back then I hadn't learned to keep my
mouth shut around him: "Yeah, but what about Tempest shielding?" I
asked. That's when he sent me off to the stacks for the first time, and
I got lost for two hours on sublevel three before I was rescued by a
passing vicar.

I go into my outer office, pull out the file
server's administration console, log on, and join the departmental
Xtank tournament. Fifteen minutes later Angleton's bell dings; I put my
game avatar on autopilot and look in on him.

Angleton positively glowers at me over his
spectacles. "Check these files back into storage, sign off, then come
back here," he says. "We need to talk."

I take the tomes and back out of his office.
Gulp: he's
noticed
me! Whatever next?

The elevator down to the stacks is about to
depart when I stick my foot in the door, holding it. Someone with a
whole document trolley has got her back to me. "Thanks," I say,
turning
to punch in my floor as the door closes and
we begin our creaky descent into the chalk foundations of London.

"No bother." I look round and see Dominique with
the doctorate from Miskatonic: Mo, whom I last saw stranded in America,
phoning me for help on a dark night. She looks surprised to see me.
"Hey! What are you doing here?"

"It's a long story, but to cut it short I was
shipped home after you phoned me. Seems those goons who were watching
you picked me up. What about you? I thought you were having trouble
getting an exit visa?"

"Are you kidding?" She laughs, but doesn't sound
very amused. "I was kidnapped, and when they rescued me I was
deported
!
And when I got back here—" Her eyes narrow.

The lift doors open on subbasement two. "You
were conscripted," I say, sticking my heel in the path of one door.
"Right?"

"If you had anything to do with it—"

I shake my head. "I'm in more or less the same
boat, believe it or not; it's how about two-thirds of us end up here.
Look, my
Obergruppenführer
will send his SS
hellhounds after me
if I'm not back in his office in ten minutes, but if you've got a free
lunchtime or evening I could fill you in?"

Her eyes narrow some more. "I'll bet you'd like
that."
Ouch!
"Have some good excuses ready, Bob," she says,
rolling her file cart toward me. I notice absently that it's full of
Proceedings
of the Scottish Society of Esoteric Antiquaries
from the nineteenth
century as I dodge out of the lift.

"No excuses," I promise, "only the truth."

"Hah." Her smile is unexpected and enigmatic;
then the lift doors slide shut, taking her down farther into the bowels
of the Stacks.

The Stacks are in what used to be a tube
station, built during World War Two as an emergency bunker and never
hooked up to the underground railway network. There are six levels
rather than the usual three, each level built into the upper or lower
half of a cylindrical tube eight metres in diameter and nearly a third
of a kilometre long. That makes for about two
kilometres of tunnels and about fifty kilometres of shelf space. To
make matters worse, lots of the material is stored in the form of
microfiche—three by five film cards each holding the equivalent of a
hundred pages of text—and some of the more recent stuff is stored on
gold CDs (of which the Stacks hold, at a rough guess, some tens of
thousands). That all adds up to a
lot
of information.

We don't use the Dewey Decimal Catalogue to
locate volumes in here; our requirements are sufficiently specialised
that we have to use the system devised by Professor Angell of Brown
University and subsequently known as the Codex Mathemagica. I've spent
the past few weeks getting my head around the more arcane aspects of a
cataloguing system that uses surreal number theory and can cope with
the N-dimensional library spaces of Borges. You might think this a
deadly boring occupation, but the ever-present danger of getting lost
in the stacks keeps you on your toes. Besides which, there are rumours
of ape-men living down here; I don't know how the rumours got started,
but this place is more than somewhat creepy when you're on your own
late at night. There's something weird about the people who work in the
stacks, and you get the feeling it could be infectious—in fact, I'm
really hoping to be assigned some other duty as soon as possible.

I locate the stack where the
Wilberforce
Tangent
and
Opal Orange
files came from and wind the aisles
of shelving apart to make way; they are both dead agent files from many
years ago, musty with the stench of bureaucratic history. I slide them
in, then pause: next to
Opal Orange
there's another file, one
with a freshly printed binding titled
Ogre Reality.
The name
tickles my silly gland, and in a gross violation of procedure I flip it
out of the shelves and check the contents page. It's all paper, at this
stage, and as soon as I see the
MOST SECRET
stamp I move to flip it shut—then pause, my eyeballs registering the
words "Santa Cruz" midway down the first page. I begin speed-reading.

Five minutes later, the small of my back soaked
in a cold sweat, I replace the file on the shelf,
wind them back together, and head for the lift as fast as my feet will
carry me. I don't want Angleton to think I'm late—
especially
after reading that file. It seems I'm lucky enough to be alive as it
is … 

"Pay attention to this, Mr.
Howard. You are in a privileged position; you have access to
information that other people would literally kill for. Because you
stumbled into the Laundry through a second-floor window, so to speak,
your technical clearance is several levels above that which would be
assigned to you if you were a generic entrant. In one respect, that is
useful; all organisations need junior personnel who have high
clearances for certain types of data. On another level, it's a major
obstacle." Angleton points his bony middle finger at me. "Because you
have no
respect.
"

He's obviously seen
The Godfather
one
time too many. I find myself waiting for a goon to step out of the
shadows and stick a gun in my ear. Maybe he just doesn't like my
T-shirt, a picture of a riot cop brandishing a truncheon beneath the
caption "Do not question authority." I swallow, wondering what's
coming
up next.

Angleton sighs deeply, then stares at the dark
greenish oil painting that hangs on his office wall behind the
visitor's hot seat. "You can fool Andrew Newstrom but you can't fool
me," he says quietly.

"You know Andy?"

"I trained him when he was your age. He has a
commitment that is in short supply these days. I know just how devoted
to this organisation
you
are. Draftees back in my day used to
understand what they'd got themselves into, but you young
ones … "

"Ask not what you can do for your country, but
what your country has ever done for you?" I raise an eyebrow at him.

He snorts. "I see you understand your
deficiencies."

I shake my head. "Not me—that's not my problem.
I decided I want to make a career here. I know I don't have to—I know
what the Laundry's for—but if I just sat around under the cameras
waiting for my pension I'd get
bored.
"

Those eyes are back on me, trying to drill right
through to the back of my head. "We know that, Howard. If you were
simply serving your time you'd be back downstairs, counting hairs on a
caterpillar or something until retirement. I've seen your record and I
am aware that you are intelligent, ingenious, resourceful, technically
adept, and no less brave than average. But that doesn't alter what I've
said one bit: you are routinely, grossly insubordinate. You think you
have a
right
to know things that people would—and do—kill
for.
You take shortcuts. You aren't an organisation man and you never will
be. If it was up to me you'd be on the outside, and never allowed
anywhere near us."

"But I'm not," I say. "Nobody even noticed me
until I'd worked out the geometry curve iteration method for invoking
Nyarlathotep and nearly wiped out Birmingham by accident. Then they
came and offered me a post as Senior Scientific Officer and made it
clear that 'no' wasn't on the list of acceptable answers. Turns out
that nuking Birmingham overrides the positive vetting requirement, so
they issued a reliability waiver and you're stuck with me. Shouldn't
you be pleased that I've decided to make the best of things and try to
be useful?"

Angleton leans forward across the polished top
of his Memex desk. With a visible effort he slews the microfiche reader
hood around so that I can see the screen, then taps one bony finger on
a mechanical keypress. "Watch and learn."

The desk whirs and clunks; cams and gears buried
deep in it shuffle hypertext links and bring up a new microfilm card. A
man's face shows up on the screen. Moustache, sunglasses, cropped hair,
forty-something and jowly with it. "Tariq Nassir al-Tikriti. Remember
that last bit. He works for a man who grew up in his home town around
the same time, who goes by the name of Saddam
Hussein al-Tikriti. Mr. Nassir's job entails arranging for funds to be
transferred from the Mukhabarat—Saddam's private Gestapo—to friendly
parties for purposes of inconveniencing enemies of the Ba'ath party of
Iraq. Friendlies such as Mohammed Kadass, who used to live in
Afghanistan before he fell foul of the Taliban."