The Atrocity Archives (14 page)

"Nice to know they're not all religious
fundamentalists," I say, as the Memex flicks to a shot of a bearded
guy
wearing a turbanlike something on his head. (He's scowling at the
camera as if he suspects it of holding Western sympathies.)

"They deported him for excessive zeal," Angelton
says heavily. "Turns out he was marshalling resources for Yusuf
Qaradawi's school. Do I need to draw you a diagram?"

"Guess not. What does Qaradawi teach?"

"Originally management studies and economics,
but lately he's added suicide bombing, the necessity for armed struggle
preceded by
Da'wa
and military preparation in order to repel
the greater
Kufr
, and gauge metrics for raster-driven
generative sepiroth on vector processors. Summoning the lesser
shoggothim in other words."

"Nng," is all I can say to that. "What's this
got to do with the price of coffee?"

Another photograph clicks up on the screen: this
time a gorgeous redhead wearing an academic gown over a posh frock. It
takes me a moment to recognise Mo. She looks about ten years younger,
and the guy in a tux whose arm she's draped over looks—well, lawyerly
seems to fit what she told me about her ex. "Dr. Dominique O'Brien. I
believe you've met?"

I glance up and Angleton is staring at me.

"Do I have your
complete
attention now,
Mr. Howard?" he rasps.

"Yeah," I concede. "Do you mean the kidnappers
in Santa Cruz—"

"Shut up and listen and you may learn
something." He waits for me to shut up, then continues. "I'm telling
you this because you're in it already, you've met
the prime candidate.
Now,
when you were sent over there we
didn't know what you were dealing with, what Dr. O'Brien was sitting
on. The Yanks did, which was why they weren't letting her go, but they
seem to have changed their minds in view of the security threat. She's
not a US citizen and they've got her research findings; interesting,
but nothing fundamentally revolutionary. Furthermore, with enough
information about her out in the public domain to attract nuisances
like the Izzadin al-Qassem hangers-on who tried to snatch her in Santa
Cruz, they don't much want her around anymore. Which is why she's over
here, in the Laundry and under wraps. They didn't simply deport her,
they asked us to take care of her."

"If it's not fundamentally revolutionary
research, why are we interested in her?" I ask.

Angleton looks at me oddly. "I'll be the judge
of that." It all clicks into place, suddenly. Suppose you worked out
how to build a Teller-Ullam configuration fusion device—a hydrogen
bomb. That wouldn't qualify as revolutionary these days, either, but
that doesn't mean it's unimportant, does it? I must give some sign of
understanding what Angleton's getting at because he nods to himself and
continues: "The Laundry is in the nonproliferation business and Dr.
O'Brien has independently rediscovered something rather more
fundamental than a technique for landscaping Wolverhampton without
first obtaining planning permission. In the States, the Black Chamber
took an interest in her—don't ask about where they fit in the American
occult intelligence complex, you really don't want to know—but
verified
that it wasn't anything new. We may not have a bilateral cooperation
treaty with them, but once they worked out that all she'd come up with
was a variation on the Logic of Thoth there was really no reason to
keep her except to prevent her falling into the hands of undesirable
persons like our friend Tariq Nassir. It's their damned munitions
export regulations again; the contents of her head are classified up
there with nerve gas and other things that go bump in the dark. Anyway,
once the mess was cleared up"—he glares at me
as he hisses the word
mess
—"they really had no reason not to
let her come home. After all, we're the ones who gave them the Logic in
the first place, back in the late fifties."

"Right … so that's all there
is to it? I
heard
those guys, they were going to open a major
gateway and drag her through it—"

Angleton abruptly switches off the Memex and
stands up, leaning over the desk at me. "Official word is that nothing
at all like that happened," he snaps. "There were no witnesses, no
evidence, and nothing happened. Because if anything
did
happen
there, that would tend to indicate that the Yanks either fucked up by
releasing her, or threw us a live hand grenade, and we know they never
fuck up, because our glorious prime minister has his lips firmly
wrapped around the presidential cigar in the hope of a renewal of the
bilateral trade agreement they're talking about in Washington next
month. Do you understand me?"

"Yeah, but—" I stop. "Ah … 
yes. Official report by Bridget, no?"

For the first time ever Angleton turns an
expression on me that might, in a bright light, if you squinted at him,
be interpreted as a faint smile. "I couldn't possibly comment."

I spin my wheels for a moment. "Nothing
happened," I say robotically. "There were no witnesses. If anything
happened it would mean we'd been passed a booby prize. It would mean
some bunch of terrorists came arbitrarily close to getting their hands
on a paranormal H-bomb designer, and someone at ONI figured they could
count coup by passing the designer to us for safe keeping, meaning they
expect us to fuck up to their political advantage. And that couldn't
possibly happen, right?"

"She's in the Library, on secondment to Pure
Research for the duration," Angleton says quite casually. "You might
want to invite the young lady out for dinner. I'd be quite interested
in hearing about her research at second hand, from someone who
obviously understands so much about predicate
calculus. Hmm, five-thirty already. You might want to go now."

Taking my cue I stand up and head for the door.
My hand is outstretched when Angleton adds, tonelessly: "How many made
it back from the raid on Wadi al-Qebir, Mr. Howard?"

I freeze.
Shit.
"Two," I hear myself
saying, unable to control my traitor larynx: it's another of those
auditor compulsion fields.
Bastard's got his office wired like an
interrogation suite!

"Very good, Mr. Howard. They were the ones who
didn't try to second-guess their commanding officer. Can I suggest that
in future you take a leaf from their book and refrain from poking your
nose into things you have been told do not concern you? Or at least
learn not to be so predictable about it."

"Ah—"

"Go away before I mock you," he says, sounding
distantly amused.

I flee, simultaneously embarrassed and relieved.

I find Mo by the simple
expedient of remembering that my palmtop is still attuned to her
aura; I bounce around the basement levels in the lift, doing a binary
search until I zero in on her in one of the reading rooms of the
library. She's poring over a fragile illuminated manuscript, inscribed
with colours that glow brilliantly beneath the hooded spotlight she
uses. She seems to be engrossed, so I knock loudly on the door frame
and wait.

"Yes? Oh, it's you."

"It's ten to six," I say diffidently. "Another
ten minutes and an orangoutang in a blue suit will come round and lock
you in for the night. I know some people enjoy that sort of thing, but
you didn't strike me as the type. So I was thinking, could you do with
a glass of wine and that explanation we were talking about?"

She looks at me deadpan. "Sounds better than
facing the urban gorillas. I've got to get home for nine but I guess I
can spare an hour. Do you have anywhere in mind?"

We end up at an earning-facilitated nerd nirvana
called Wagamama, just off New Oxford Street: you can't miss it, just
look for the queue of fashion victims halfway around the block. Some of
them have been waiting so long that the cobwebs have fossilised. My
impressions are of a huge stainless steel kitchen and Australian expat
waiters on rollerblades beaming infrared orders and wide-eyed smiles at
each other from handheld computers as they skate around the refectory
tables, where earnest young things in tiny rectangular spectacles
discuss Derrida's influence on alcopop marketing via the next big
dot-sad IPO, or whatever it is the "in" herd is obsessing about these
days over their gyoza and organic buckwheat ramen. Mo is crammed
opposite me at one end of a barrack-room table of bleached pine that
looks as if they polish it every night with a microtome blade; our
neighbours are giggling over some TV studio deal, and she's looking at
me with an analytical expression borrowed from the laboratory razor's
owner.

"The food's very good," I offer defensively.

"It's not that"—she gazes past my shoulder—"it's
the culture. It's very Californian. I wasn't expecting the rot to have
reached London yet."

"We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be
reengineered in an attractive range of colour schemes for your safety
and comfort!"

"Something like that." A waitron whizzes past
and smart-bombs us both with cans of Kirin that feel as if they've been
soaked in liquid nitrogen. Mo picks hers up and winces at me as it
bites her fingertips. "Why do they call it the Laundry?"

"Uh … " I think for a moment. "Back in the Second
World War, they were based in a requisitioned
Chinese laundry in Soho, I think. They got Dansey House when the
Dustbin's new skyscraper was commissioned." I pick up my beer
carefully, using a mitten improvised from my sleeve,
and tip the can into a glass. "Claude Dansey, he was stuck in charge of
SOE. Former SIS dude, didn't get on well with the top nobs—it was all
politics; SOE was the cowboy arm of British secret ops during the war.
Churchill charged SOE with setting Europe ablaze behind German lines,
and that's exactly what they tried to do. Until December 1945, when SIS
got their revenge, of course."

"So the bureaucratic infighting goes that far
back?"

"Guess so." I take a sip of beer. "But the
Laundry survived more or less intact after the rest of SOE was gutted,
like the way GCHQ survived even though the Bletchley Park operation was
wound up. Only more secretively." Hmm. This is
not
stuff we
should be talking about in public; I pull out my palmtop and tap away
at it until a rather useful utility shows up.

"What's that?" she asks interestedly, as the
background clatter and racket diminishes to a haze of white noise.

"Laundry-issue palmtop. Looks like an ordinary
Palm Pilot, doesn't it? But the secret's in the software and the rather
unusual daughterboard soldered inside the case."

"No, I mean the noise—it isn't just my ears, is
it?"

"No, it's magic."

"Magic! But—" She glares at me. "You're not
kidding, are you? What the hell is going on around here?"

I look at her blankly: "Nobody told you?"

"Magic!"
She looks disgusted.

"Well okay, then, it's applied mathematics. I
thought you said you're not a Platonist? You should be. These
boxes"—I
tap the palmtop—"are the most powerful mathematical tools we've
developed. Things were done on an ad-hoc basis until about 1953, when
Turing came up with his final theorem; since then, we've been putting
magic on a systematic basis, on the QT. Most of it boils down to the
application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by
an information conservation rule, or so they tell
me when I ask. When we carry out a computation it has side effects that
leak through some kind of channel underlying the structure of the
Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse there are listeners; sometimes we
can coerce them into opening gates. Small gates we can transfer minds
through, or big gates we can move objects through. Even really huge
gates, big enough to take something huge and unpleasant—some of the
listeners are
big.
Giants. Sometimes we can invoke local
reversals or enhancements of entropy; that's what I'm doing right now
with the sound damper field, fuzzing the air around us, which is
already pretty random. That's basically the business the Laundry is
in."

"Ah." She chews her lower lip for a moment,
appraising me. "So that's why you were so interested in me. Say, do you
have any references for this work of Turing's? I'd like to read up on
it."

"It's classified, but—"

"Wtyjdfshjwrtha rssradth aeywerg?"

I turn and look at the waitress who's beaming at
me inscrutably. " 'Scuse me." I tap the "pause" button on screen.
"What was that again?"

"I said, are you ready to order yet?"

I shrug at Mo, she nods, and we order. The
waitron skids off and I tap the "pause" button again. "I didn't
originally volunteer for the Laundry," I feel compelled to add. "They
drafted me much the same way they drafted you. On the one hand, it
sucks. On the other hand, the alternatives are a whole lot worse."

She looks angry now. "What do you mean, worse?"

"Well"—I lean back—"for starters, your work on
probability engineering. You probably thought it was mostly irrelevant,
except to theoretical types like Pentagon strategic planners. But if we
mix it up with a localised entropy inversion we can make life
very
hot for whoever or whatever is on the receiving end. I'm not clear on
the details, but apparently it's at the root of
one particularly weird directed invocation: if we can set up a gauge
field for probability metrics we can tune in on specific EIs fairly—"

"EIs?"

"External Intelligences. What the mediaeval
magic types called demons, gods, spirits, what have you. Sentient
aliens, basically, from those cosmological domains where the anthropic
principle predominates and some sort of sapient creatures have evolved.
Some of them are strongly superhuman, others are dumb as a stump from
our perspective. What counts is that they can be coerced, sometimes,
into doing what people want. Some of them can also open wormholes—yes,
they've got access to negative matter—and send themselves, or other
entities, through. As I understand it, general indeterminacy theory
lets us target them very accurately: it's the difference between
dialling a phone number at random and using a phone book. I think."