The Atrocity Archives (16 page)

She sips her coffee as it cools. "After we met,
I went home thinking everything was going to be okay. You, or the
Foreign Office, or whoever, would sort things out so I could come home.
It was all just a mix-up, right? I'd get my visa sorted out and be
allowed to go back home without any more problems."

Another mouthful of coffee. "I walked back to my
condo. That's one of the things I liked about UCSC: the town's small
enough you can walk anywhere. You don't have to drive as long as you
don't mind getting to SF being a royal pain. I
was turning over a problem I'm working on, a way to integrate my
probability formalism with Dempster-Shaffer logic. Anyhow, I stopped
off at a convenience store to buy some stuff I was running out of and
who should I run into but David? At least, I
thought
it was
David." She frowns. "I thought he was out east, and I really didn't
want to see him anyway—I mean, I'm over him. He's history."

"What makes you think it wasn't your
ex-husband?" I ask.

"Nothing, at the time. He just turned round from
the counter and smiled at me and said, 'Can I give you a lift home?'
and I sort of … " she trails off.

"It offered you a lift home," I echo.

"What do you mean,
it
?"

I close my eyes. "You got yourself into some
really smelly shit there. Say some son of a bitch wants to abduct
somebody. They have to get a victim profile, samples from the
victim—it's not simple, not just messing around with hair or
fingernail
clippings for the DNA—but suppose they get it. Then they invoke, um,
generate a vector field oriented on the victim's—"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll take that bit on trust."

"Okay then. I'll give you some references
tomorrow. Basically it's what used to be called an incubus: a demon
lover. Something the victim won't resist because they don't
want
to resist. It's not actually a demon; it's just a hallucination, like a
website generated by customer relationship management software from
hell."

"A lure?"

"Yes, that's it exactly. A lure." I placed my
unfinished mug down between my feet.

She shudders, looks worried. "Maybe I wasn't
over him as thoroughly as I wanted to be."

"I know the feeling," I say, thinking of Mhari.

She shakes herself. "Anyway. Next thing I know
I'm sitting in the back of a Lincoln and some guy I don't know who's
wearing a Nehru suit and a beard is sticking a pistol in
my side. And he says something like, 'American bitch, you have been
selected for a great honour.' And I say, 'I'm not American,' and he
just sneers."

Her hand is shaking so badly that coffee slops
on the floor.

"He just—"

"It doesn't matter, what happens next?" I ask,
trying to get her over the emotional hump. Over there they hold grudges
for a long time. Some of the Pathans are probably still plotting their
revenge for Lord Elphinstone's expedition.

"We drive around for a bit and head out of town,
northbound on Highway 1, then the car pulls up to this house and the
driver opens the door and they push me in through a side door into the
house. The driver's wearing that long, baggy shirt and trousers you see
on TV, and a scarf around his head, and he's got a beard, too. They
push me through the kitchen and into a closet with a light then shut
the door, and I hear them chain the door handles together. Someone else
comes in and they talk for a bit, then I hear a door slam. That's when
I pulled out my mobile phone and called you."

"You overheard them talking. What about?"

"I—wasn't concentrating much. Tell the
truth"—she puts the cup down on the floor; its saucer is swimming in
coffee—"I was afraid they were going to rape me.
Really
afraid;
I mean, this was kidnapping, what would you expect? When they didn't,
when they were talking, it was almost worse. Does that make any kind of
sense? The waiting. But he—the one I didn't see—he had a deep voice,
some accent—sounded German to me. Thick, gravelly, lots of sibilants.
Had to keep repeating himself to the others, the Middle Eastern men.
'The Opener of the Ways requires the wisdom,' he kept saying. 'It needs
information.' I think one of the Middle Eastern guys was objecting
because after a bit there was a noise like—" She pauses, and
swallows. "Like downstairs. And I didn't hear him again."

I shake my head. "This isn't making any sense so
far—" Hastily: "No, I'm not saying you're wrong,
I just can't figure out how it fits together. That's
my
problem, not yours."

I drain my coffee and wince as it hits my
stomach and sits there, burning like a lump of molten lead. "Sounds
like they were talking about a blood sacrifice. That's the Sacrifice of
Knowledge rite. Middle Eastern guys. An incubus. German accent. You're
sure it was German?"

"Yes," she says gloomily. "At least, I think it
was German; Middle European for sure."

"That really
is
odd." Which distracts me
and catapults my train of thought right into terra incognita because
there are
no
usual suspects in the occult field in Germany; the
Abwehr's Rosenberg Gruppe and any survivors of the Thule Gesellschaft
were "shot trying to escape" by late June 1945. The camp guards were
mostly executed or pulled long prison sentences, the higher-ups
responsible for the Ahnenerbe-SS were executed, the whole country
turned into a DMZ as far as the occult is concerned. After the Third
Reich's answer to the Manhattan Project came so close to completion,
that was about the one thing that Truman and Stalin and Churchill all
saw eye-to-eye on—and the current government shows no desire to go
back
down that route of blood and madness.

"He went on a bit," Mo adds unexpectedly.

"Really? What about?"

"He wanted to go home, to take help home,
something like that. I think."

I sit up, wince as my ribs remind me not to move
too fast. "Help. Did he say what kind?"

Mo frowns again. Her thick, dark eyebrows almost
join in the middle, looming like thunderclouds. "He went on about the
Opener of the Ways a bit more. Oddly, as if he was talking about me.
Said that help for the struggle against the Dar-al-Harb would wait
until the ceremony of, uh, 'Unbinding the roots of Ig-drazl'? Then he
would 'Open the bridge and bring the ice giants through.' He was very
emphatic about the bridge, the bridge to living
space. That was his term for it:
living space.
Does that make
any sense?"

"It makes an
oh-shit
kind of sense." I
watch as she picks up her mug and rolls it round between her hands.
"Was that all?"

"All? Yes. I waited until I heard them go out,
then I phoned you. I obviously got things wrong, though, because the
next thing I knew they yanked open the door and the one with the gun
grabbed the phone and stamped on it. He was
angry,
but the
other—with the accent—" She judders to a stop.

"Can you describe him?"

She swallows. "That's the crazy thing. From the
voice I kind of expected Arnie Schwarzenegger in
The Terminator
,
except he
wasn't.
There were just these four Middle Eastern
guys, and one of them had—I can't, uh, can't remember his face. Just
those eyes. They seemed to glow, sort of greenish. Like marbles. Like
there was something luminous and wormy behind his face. He—the one
with
the eyes and this weird German accent—he was
angry
and yelled
at me and I was so afraid, but they just smashed my phone then shut the
door on me again. Chained the door shut and overturned a table or
something against it. And I—hell." She finishes her coffee. "That was
about the worst hour of my life." Pause. "It could have been worse."
Pause. "They could have." Pause. "You might not have answered."
Pause. "They might not have found me."

"All in a day's work," I say with forced
lightheartedness, which has nothing to do with the way I feel. "When
the cops brought you out, did you see anything?"

"I wasn't paying much attention," she says
shakily. "There were gunshots, though. Then what looked like a whole
SWAT team kicked the cupboard door in and pointed their toys at me. You
ever had two guys point assault rifles at your head, so close you can
see the grooves on the inside of the barrels? You just lie there very
still and try very hard not to look threatening." Pause. "Anyway, one
of the agents in charge figured out I was the
hostage in about three seconds flat and they led me out through the
front. There was blood everywhere and two bodies, but not the guy with
the weird eyes. I'd recognize him. Thing is, there were strange symbols
all over the wall; it was whitewashed and it looked like they'd been
painting on it in thick black paint, or blood, or something. A low
table under it, with a trashed laptop and some other stuff.
Candlesticks, an arc-welding power supply. It was weird, I guess you'd
know how weird it looked. Then they drove me away."

My bad feeling is getting worse. In fact, it's
not setting off alarm bells in my head anymore: it's sounding the Three
Minute Warning. "Mind if I use your phone?" I ask, carefully
nonchalant. "I think we still need the Plumbers."

Due to the miracles of
matrix management Bridget is my head of department and writes my
personal efficiency assessments, and Harriet is her left hand of
darkness and handles administrative issues like training; but since I
moved to active service, Andy is now my line manager with overall
responsibility for my effectiveness and work assignment, and Angleton
is just the guy I'm acting as temporary private secretary for. I decide
to start at the bottom of the seniority queue, consign Harriet to the
pits of operational ineffectiveness—I mean, this is a woman who would
give you a written reprimand for wasting departmental funds if you used
silver bullets on a werewolf—and conclude that my best chance of
survival is to throw myself on Andy's mercy.

Which means I nobble him absolutely as soon as I
can, first thing in the morning.

"Mind if I have a word?" I ask, sticking my head
around his door without asking—the red light is off.

Andy is slumped behind his desk, nursing his
starter-motor coffee mug. He raises an eyebrow at me. "You look—" He
stabs a finger at his keyboard, raises another eyebrow at his email.
"Oh. So it was
you
who called the
Plumbers out last night."

I sit down in the chair opposite his desk
without asking permission. "Angleton told me to pump Mo after work"—I
see his expression—"for information, dammit!"

Andy hides behind his coffee. "Do go on," he
says warmly, "this is the best entertainment I'm going to get all
morning."

"Then you must be hard up. We ate out, then went
back to her place for some more sensitive discussions about the, uh,
non-events last month. Something was waiting for us in the lobby."

"Something." He looks sceptical. "And you called
out the Plumbers for that?"

I yawn: it's been a long night. "It tried to rip
her fucking head off and I've got a cracked rib to show for it. If
you'd read that goddamn report you'd see what forensics found in the
carpet; they're never going to get the ichor stains out—"

"I'll read it." He puts his coffee mug down. "First, give me the
basics. How did you deal with it?"

I produce the wreckage of my Laundry-issue
palmtop. "I'll be needing a new PDA, this one's fucked. Mind you, it's
not as fucked as the malevolent mollusc from Mars that jumped us; I
bumped the fuzz diffuser up to full power and piped the entire entropy
pool into it over wide-spectrum infrared. It decided it didn't like
that and discorporated instead of sticking around to finish the job,
otherwise you'd be spending this morning watching them hoover me off
the walls and ceiling."

I take as deep a breath as the strapping around
my ribs will permit. "Anyway, afterward I got the whole story out of
Mo. The bits she was afraid of telling anyone for fear they wouldn't
believe her. And that's why I called the Plumbers. See, the Yank field
group who rescued her didn't tell us what the hell was going on. The
leader was some Arab guy with a German accent, talking about help for
the struggle with the Dar-al-Harb once the roots of Yggdrasil are
unbound. Only they didn't get him—or she didn't see
his body. Boss, do we have anything on German terror groups using
Beckenstein-Skinner actor theory to possess their victims? Hell,
anything about any German terror groups more recent than the Ahnenerbe
using occult techniques?"

Andy looks at me with a stony expression. "Wait
here. Do
not
move." He pushes the DNI button (turning on the
red warning light outside the door—
WARNING
:
CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES
:
DO NOT INTRUDE
) then stands up and hurries out.

I sit there and let my eyes roam around Andy's
cubbyhole. The contents are prosaic: one institutional desk
(scratched), one swivel chair (used), two armless visitor chairs
(ditto), one bookcase, and a classified document safe (basically a
steel cabinet with lockable metal doors on it). His PC is five years
old and running a password-locked screensaver, and his desk is
clear—no
papers lying around. In fact, if it wasn't for the classified document
safe and the lack of papers it could be a low-level manager's office in
any cash-pinched business in corporate Britain.

I'm leaning back in my chair and inspecting the
flecks of institutional paint smeared on the frosted glass in the high
window when the door opens again. Andy enters, closely followed by
Derek and—shock, horrors—Angleton. I'm surrounded! "Here he is,"
says
Andy.

Angleton claims Andy's chair behind the desk—the
privilege of the senior inquisitor—and Andy sits down next to me,
while
Derek stands at parade rest in front of the door, as if to stop me
escaping. He's got some kind of box like a small briefcase, which he
parks on the floor next to his feet.