The Atrocity Archives (17 page)

"Speak," says Angleton.

"I did as you told me. Mo and I were talking. I
kept it to non-classified while we were in public; I convinced her I
needed to hear the full story, not just the official version, so we
went back to her place. We were jumped in the hallway. Afterward, she
told me enough that I thought there was a clear and present danger to
her life. Did Andy tell you—"

Angleton snaps his fingers at Derek. Derek, who
is not my idea of an obedient flunky, nevertheless obediently passes
him the briefcase, which he opens on the desk. It turns out to contain
a small mechanical typewriter with a couple of sheets of paper already
wound around the roller. He laboriously taps out a sentence, then turns
the typewriter toward me: it says SECRET OGRE CARNATE GECKO, and I get
an abrupt sinking feeling in my stomach.

"Before you leave this office you will write
down everything you remember about last night," he says tersely. "You
will not leave this office until you have finished and signed off on
the report. One of us will stay with you until the job is done, and
countersign that this is a true transcript and that there were no
uncleared witnesses. Once you leave this office you will not see this
document again. You will not, repeat
not,
discuss last night's
events with anyone other than the participants and the people in this
room without first obtaining written permission from one of us. Do you
understand?"

"Uh, yeah. You're classifying everything under
OGRE CARNATE GECKO and I'm not to discuss it with anyone who isn't
cleared. Can I ask why the typewriter? I could email—"

Angleton looks at me witheringly: "Van Eck
Radiation." He snaps his fingers.
But we're in the Laundry,
I
protest silently,
the whole building is Tempest-shielded.
"Start typing, Bob."

I start typing. "Where's the delete key on
this—oh."

"You're typing on carbon paper. In triplicate.
Once you finish, we burn the carbons. And the typewriter ribbon."

"You could have offered a quill pen: that'd be
more secure, wouldn't it?" I peck away at the keyboard in a purposeful
manner. After a minute or two Angleton silently rises and ghosts out of
the room. I peck on, occasionally swearing as I catch a fingernail
under a key or jam a bunch of letters together. Finally I'm done: one
page of single-spaced, densely printed text, detailing the events of
last night. I sign each copy and present them to
Andy, who countersigns, then carefully inserts them into a
striped-cover folder and passes it to Derek, who writes out receipts
for them and hands a copy to each of us. He leaves without a word.

Andy walks round the desk, stretches, then looks
at me. "What am I going to do with you?"

"Huh? What's wrong?"

Andy looks morose. "If I'd known you'd show such
a well-developed talent for raking up the mud … "

"Comes of my hacking hobby before I came to the
attention of … look. I called the Plumbers because I
had reason to be afraid that Mo—Professor O'Brien—was in serious
danger. Would you rather I hadn't?"

"No." He sighs. For a moment he looks old. "You
did the right thing. It's just that the Plumbing budget is chargeable
to departmental accounts. That leaves us open to some rather nasty
maneuvering if the usual suspects decide it's an opportunity to extend
their little empires. I'm wondering how the hell we're going to spin it
past Harriet."

"Why don't you just tell—oh."

"Yes." He nods at me. "You're beginning to catch
on. Now run along and get back to work. I'm sure your in-tray is
overflowing."

I'm working my way through
that overcrowded in-tray late in the afternoon when Harriet
stalks in without knocking. (Actually, I'm up to my eyeballs in a
clipping from the
Santa Cruz County Sentinel.
It makes for
fascinating reading: TWO DEAD IN MURDER, SUICIDE. Two unidentified
males, one believed to be a Saudi Arabian national, found dead in a
house out toward Davenport. Police investigating weird occult symbols
smeared on the walls in blood. Drugs suspected.) "Ah, Bob," she coos
with malevolent solicitude. "Just the person I was looking for!"

Oh shit.
"What can I do for you?" I ask.

She leans over my desk. "I understand you called
out the Plumbers last night," she says. "I happen to know that you're
currently assigned to Angleton as JPS, which is a nonoperational role
and therefore doesn't give you release authority for wet-and-dry
issues. You are no doubt aware that cleanup funds are allocated on a
per-department basis, and require prior authorisation from your head of
department, in writing. You didn't obtain authorisation from Bridget,
and funnily enough, you didn't approach me for a release either." She
smiles with chilly insouciance. "Would you like to explain yourself?"

"I can't," I say.

"I—
see.
" Harriet looms over me, visibly
working on her anger. "You realise that last night you cost our working
budget more than seven
thousand
pounds? That's going to have to
be justified, Mr. Howard, and
you
are going to justify it to
the Audit Commission when they come round next month. Let's see"—she
flips through what looks for all the world like a commercial
invoice—"cleaning up Professor O'Brien's front door, sweeping her
apartment for listeners and actors,
rehousing
Professor O'Brien
in a secure apartment, armed escort, medical expenses. What on earth
have you been up to?"

"I can't tell you," I say.

"You're going to tell me. That's an order, by
the way," she says in conversational tones. "You're going to tell me
in
writing
exactly
what happened there last night, and explain why
I shouldn't take the expenses out of your pay packet—"

"Harriet."

We both look round. Angleton's door is ajar; I
wonder how long he's been standing there.

"You don't have clearance," he says. "Let it
drop.
That's
an order."

The door shuts. Harriet stands there for a
moment, her jaw working soundlessly as if she's forgotten how to speak.
I commit the spectacle to memory for future enjoyment. "Don't
think this is the last you'll hear of this," she snaps at me as she
leaves, slamming the door.

TWO DEAD IN MURDER, SUICIDE. Hmm. Ahnenerbe.
Thule Gesellschaft. Incubi. German accents. Opener of the Ways.
Double-hmm. I pull my terminal closer; it's only got access to
low-classification and public sources, but it's time to do some serious
data mining. I wonder … just what have Yusuf
Qaradawi's friends and the Mukhabarat got to do with the last and most
secret nightmares of the Third Reich?

The next day I go into the
office and find Nick waiting for me at my desk like an
overexcited trainee schoolmaster. This is an unscheduled intrusion in
my plans, which mostly revolve around applying some security patches to
the departmental file server and digging out the maintenance schematics
to Angleton's antique Memex.

"Come along now! I've got something to show
you," he says, in a tone that makes it clear I don't have any choice.
He leads me up a staircase carpeted in a thick bottle-green pile that I
haven't seen before, then along a corridor with dark, oak-panelled
walls like a provincial gentlemen's club from the 1930s, except that
gentlemen's clubs don't come with closed circuit TV cameras and
combination locks on the doors.

"What
is
this place?" I ask.

"Used to be the director's manor," he explains. "When we had a
director." When we had a director: I don't ask. He stops
at a thick oak door and punches some digits into the lock, then opens
it. "After you," he says.

There's a conference table and a modern—by
Laundry standards—laptop set up at one end of it. A whole shitload of
electronics racked up on shelves behind, along with some thick
leather-bound books and a bunch of stuff like silver pencils, jars of
mouldy dust, and what looks for all the world
like a polygraph. As I go in I notice that the doorframe is unusually
thick and there are no outside windows. "Is this shielded?" I ask.

Nick nods jerkily. "Well spotted, that man! Now
sit down," he suggests.

I sit. The top shelf of the equipment rack is
dominated by a glass bell jar with a human skull in it; I grin back at
it. " 'Alas, poor Yorick.' "

"Carry on like you have been and maybe your head
will fetch up in there one day," Nick says, grinning. "Ah." The door
opens. "Andy."

"Why am I here?" I ask. "All this cloak and
dagger shit is—"

Andy drops a fat lever-arch file on the table in
front of me. "Read and enjoy," he says dryly. "One day you, too, can
have the fun of maintaining this manual."

I open the cover to be confronted by a sheet
which basically says I can be arrested for so much as thinking about
disclosing the contents of the next page. I flip to page two and read a
paragraph that essentially says "Abandon hope all ye who enter here,"
so I turn
that
one over and get to the title page: FIELD
OPERATIONS MANUAL FOR COUNTER-OCCULT OPERATIONS. Below it, in small
print:
Approved by Departmental Quality Assurance Team
and then
Complies with BS5750 standard for total quality management.
I
shudder. "Since when have we been into mummification?" I ask.

"Embalming—" Andy frowns for a moment. "Oh, you
mean total quality—" He stops and clears his throat. "One of these
days
your sense of humour is going to get you into trouble, Bob."

"Thanks for the advance warning." I look at the
manual gloomily. "Let me guess. I'm to do as we discussed earlier—by
the book.
This
book, right? Why wasn't I issued it before Santa
Cruz?"

Andy pulls out the chair beside me and flops
down in it. "Because that wasn't officially an operation," he says in
tones of sweet reason. "That was an informal
information-gathering exercise involving a nonclassified source.
Operations require sign-off at director level. Informal
information-gathering exercises don't."

I put the folder down on the table. "Does
Bridget have anything to do with this?"

"Tangentially."

Nick sniffs, loudly, from his post by the door. "Arse-covering, boy.
That
was meant to be a risk-free chat.
This
is about what you do when you're ordered to stick your head in the
lion's mouth. Or up its arse to inspect the hemorrhoids."

I look round at him. "You're planning on sending
me on an op?" I ask. "Happy joy. Not."

Andy glances at Nick. "He's beginning to get
it," he comments.

"Are you planning on involving Professor O'Brien
in this?" I ask. "I mean, it seems to me that she's the one under
threat. Isn't she?"

"Well." Andy glances at Nick, then back at me. "You're on active
service, so you need to know this stuff inside out
and upside down. But you're right, the specific reason for this session
is what happened the other night. I can't confirm or deny the
identities of anyone else involved, though."

"Then I've got a problem," I tell him. "I don't
know if I should bring it up right now, but if I sit on it and I'm
wrong … well, way I see it is, Mo is the one who's
under threat and in need of protection. Right? I mean,
I
can
cope with being drooled over by things with more tentacles than brains,
but it's not exactly part of her job description, is it? You're
supposed to be responsible for her safety. If you've got me going over
rules of engagement, and she's involved, then when the shooting
starts—"

Andy is nodding. It's a bad sign when your boss
starts nodding at you before you finish each sentence.

"As a matter of fact I agree with your concerns
completely," he says. "And yes, I agree we've got a problem. But it's
not quite what you think it is." He leans forward and makes
a steeple out of his fingers, elbows together on the table. The steeple
leans sideways at an architecturally unsound angle. "We can probably
keep her safe indefinitely, as long as she's locked down under a
protection program and resident in one of our secure accommodation
units. That's not in question; if nobody can see or track her, they
can't attack her—although I'm not sure about the inability to track
given that they must have obtained samples in order to spring that
incubus on her last month. What concerns me is that such a posture is
essentially defensive. We don't know for sure just what we're defending
against,
Bob, and that's bad."

Andy takes a deep breath, but Nick jumps in
before he can continue: "We've dealt with Iraqi spies before, boy. This
doesn't smell like them."

"Uh." I pause, unsure what to say. "What do you
mean?"

"He means that the Mukhabarat simply don't have
the technology to summon an incubus. Nor do they generally manage
incarnations that leave Precambrian slime all over the carpet; about
all they're up to is interrogation and compulsion of Watchers and a
little bit of judicious torture. No real control of phase-space
geometry, no Enochian deep grammar parse-tree generators—at least none
that we've seen the source code to. So we can't make any assumptions
about the attacks on Mo. Someone tried to grab her for whatever
purpose. By now, they must know we're onto them. The next logical step
is for them to pull back and switch track to whatever they were working
on in the first place—which is extremely dangerous for us because if
they were trying to snatch her, they were probably working on weapons
of mass destruction. We badly need to get them out in the open and our
only bait is Professor O'Brien. But if she knows she's bait, she'll
keep looking round for sharks—which will tip them off. So we're
assigning you to shadow her, Bob. You keep an eye on her. We'll keep an
eye on you. When they bite, we'll reel them in. You don't need to know
how, or when, but you'll do well to read
this manual so you know how we set up this kind of situation. Clear?"