The Atrocity Archives (18 page)

I crane my neck round at Nick, whose expression
is uncharacteristically flat: he stares right through me with eyes like
gunsights. "I don't like it. I
really
don't like it."

"You don't have to," Andy says flatly. "We're
telling
you what to do. Your job is—I shouldn't be telling you this, it should
be Angleton, this afternoon, but what the hell—you're going to be
assigned to shadow Mo. We'll do the rest. All I want to hear from you
now is that you're going to do as you're told."

I tense. "Is that an order?"

"It is now," says Nick.

When I get home after
receiving my mission orders and preemptive chewing-out from
Angleton I find my key doesn't turn in the lock. It's dark and it's
raining so I lean on the doorbell continuously until the door swings
open. Pinky stands behind it, one hand on the latch. "What took you so
long?" I ask him.

He steps back. "These are yours, I believe," he
says, handing me a bunch of shiny new keys. He clanks as he walks; he's
wearing black combat boots, matching trousers, what looks like a
leather vest, and enough chains to stock a medium-sized prison. "I'm
off clubbing tonight."

"Why the new keys?" I close the door and shake
my hair, shrug off my coat, and try to find room to hang it in the hall.

"They changed the locks today," he says
conversationally, "departmental orders, apparently." There's a new mat
inside the front door, and when I look closely I see silvery lettering
in a very small font stitched into its edges. "They came and swept the
house for listeners and actors then renewed the wards on all the
windows, the doors, the air vents—even the chimney. Any idea why?"

"Yeah," I grunt. I head for the kitchen,
squeezing past someone's battered suitcases that are parked in the hall.

"We've got a new flatmate, too," he adds. "Oh,
Mhari's fucked off again, but this time she says she's moving into
House Orange for good."

"Ah-hum."
Twist the knife in the wound, why
don't you?
I inspect the kettle, then poke around inside my
cupboard to see if there's any food more substantial than a pot noodle.

"You'll probably like the new flatmate, though,"
Pinky continues. "She's helping Brains with his omelettes in the front
cellar—he's using high-intensity ultrasound, this time."

I find a pot noodle and a desiccated supermarket
pizza base. There's cheese and tomato paste in the fridge, and a pork
sausage I can chop up to go on top of it, so I turn the grill on. "Any
newspapers?" I ask.

"Newspapers? Why?"

"I have to book a flight. I'm taking a week's
leave next Monday, and it's already Wednesday."

"Going anywhere interesting?"

"Amsterdam."

"Cool!" There's a pair of fur-lined handcuffs on
the bread board; Pinky picks them up and eyes them critically, then
starts polishing them on a square of kitchen roll. "Party on?"

"I have some research to do at the
Oostindischehuis. And in the basement of the Rijksmuseum."

"Research." He rolls his eyes and tucks the
handcuffs into a belt clip. "What a
boring
use for a holiday in
Amsterdam!"

I chop bits of pork sausage up and sprinkle them
over my garbage pizza, oblivious. The cellar door swings open. "Did
somebody mention Amsterdam—hey, what are
you
doing here?"

I drop my knife. "Mo? What are
you
—"

"Bob? Hey, have you guys met?"

" 'Scuse me, would you mind moving? I need
to get through—"

With four people in the kitchen it's distinctly
cosy, not to say crowded. I move my pizza up
under the grill and switch the kettle on again. "Who put you up here?"
I ask Mo.

"The Plumbers—they said this was a secure
apartment," she says, rubbing the side of her nose. She peers at me
suspiciously. "What's going on?"

"It
is
a secure apartment," I say
slowly. "It's on the Laundry list."

"Bob's girlfriend just moved out for the fourth
time," Pinky explains helpfully. "They must have thought the spare
room
needed filling."

"Oh, this is too much." Mo pulls out a chair and
sits down with her back against the wall, arms crossed defensively.

"Guys?" I ask. "Could you take it outside?"

"Certainly," Brains sniffs, and disappears back
into the cellar.

Pinky smiles. "I knew you'd hit it off!" he
says, then ducks out of the room hastily.

A minute later the front door slams. Mo fixes me
with a magistrate's stare. "You live here? With those two?"

"Yeah." I inspect the grill. "They're mostly
harmless, when they're not trying to take over the world each night."

"Trying to—" She stops. "That one. Uh, Pinky?
He's out clubbing?"

"Yes, but he never brings any rough trade home,"
I explain. "He and Brains have been together for, oh, as long as I've
known them."

"Oh."
I see the light bulb go on above
her head: some people are a bit slow on the uptake about Pinky and
Brains.

"Brains doesn't get out a lot. Pinky is a party
animal, a bit of rubber, a bit of leather. Every few weeks, whenever
the moon is in the right phase, hairs burst from the palms of his hands
and he turns into a wild bear with a compulsion to terrorise Soho.
Brains doesn't seem to notice. They're like an old married couple. Once
a year Pinky drags Brains out to Pride so he can maintain his security
clearance."

"I
see."
She relaxes a little but looks
puzzled. "I thought the secret services sacked you for being homosexual?"

"They
used to, said it made you a security risk. Which was silly, because it was the
practice of firing homosexuals that made them vulnerable to blackmail in the
first place. So these days they just insist on openness—the theory is you
can only be blackmailed if you're hiding something. Which is why the Brain gets
the day off for Gay Pride to maintain his security clearance."

"Ah—I give up." She smiles. The smile fades fast. "I've still got to
move my stuff in. They're packing up the flat and I didn't have much anyway,
most of my furniture is in a shipping container somewhere on the
Atlantic … Why Amsterdam, Bob?"

I prod at the pizza,
which is beginning to melt on top as the grill strains to heat it up. "I've been
doing a bit of digging." I wince: my rib stabs at me. "Things you said last
night. Oh, has anyone said anything to you?"

"No." She looks puzzled.

"Well, don't be surprised if in the next couple of days Andy or Derek drops
by and gets you to sign a piece of paper saying that you'll cut your own throat
before talking to anyone without clearance. That's what they did to me; they're
taking it seriously."

"Well
that's
a relief," she says with heavy
irony. "Did you learn anything?"

The pizza is bubbling away on top; I
turn the grill down so that it can heat right through. "Coffee?"

"Tea, if
you've got it."

"Okay. Um, I did some reading. Did you know that what you
overheard is completely impossible? As in, it can't happen because it's not
allowed?"

"It's not—hang on." She glares at me. "If you're pulling
my leg—"

"Would I do a thing like that?" I must look the image of
hurt innocence because she chuckles wickedly.

"I wouldn't put anything past you, Bob. Okay, what do you mean by 'it's not
allowed'? As your professor I am ordering you to tell me everything."

"Uh, isn't it my job to say, 'Tell me, professor'?"

She waves it off:
"Nah, that would be a cliché. So tell me. What the fornicating hell is
happening? Why does someone or something try to render me metabolically
incompetent whenever I meet you?"

"Well, it goes back to around 1919," I
say, dropping tea bags into a chipped pot. "That was when the Thule
Gessellschaft was founded in Munich by Baron von Sebottendorff. The Thule
Society were basically mystical whack-jobs, but they had a lot of clout; in
particular they were heavily into Masonic symbolism and a load of post-
Theosophical guff about how the only true humans were the Aryan race, and the
rest—the
Mindwertigen,
'inferior beings'—were sapping their
strength and purity and precious bodily fluids. All of this wouldn't have
mattered much except a bunch of these goons were mixed up in Bavarian street
politics, the Freikorps and so on. They sort of cross-fertilised with a small
outfit called the NSDAP, whose leader was a former NCO and agent provocateur
sent by the Landswehr to keep an eye on far-right movements. He picked up a lot
of ideas from the Thule Society and when he got where he wanted he told the head
of his personal bodyguard—a guy called Heinrich Himmler, another occult
obsessive—to put Walter Darre, one of Alfred Rosenberg's
protégés, in charge of the Ahnenerbe Society. Ahnenerbe was
originally independent, but rapidly turned into a branch of the SS after 1934; a
sort of occult R&D department cum training college. Meanwhile the Gestapo
orchestrated a pretty severe crackdown on all nonparty occultists in the Third
Reich; Adolf wanted a monopoly on esoteric power, and he got it."

I
switch off the grill. "All this would have amounted to exactly zip except that
some nameless spark in the Ahnenerbe research arm unearthed David Hilbert's
unpublished Last Question. And from there to the Wannsee Conference was just a
short step."

"Hilbert, Wannsee—you've lost me. What did the
calculus of variations have to do with Wannsee, wherever that is?"

"Wrong
question, right Hilbert; it's not one of the Twenty-Three Questions on unsolved
problems in mathematics, it's something he did later. Thing is, Hilbert was
experimenting with some very odd ideas toward the end, before he died in 1943.
He'd more or less pioneered functional analysis, he came up with Hilbert
Space—obviously—and he was working toward a 'proof theory' in the
mid-thirties, a theory for formally proving the correctness of theorems. Yeah, I
know, Gödel holed that one under the waterline in 1931. Anyhow, you know
Hilbert's published work dropped off sharply in the 1930s and he didn't publish
anything
in the 1940s? And yes, he'd read Turing's doctoral thesis. Do I
need to draw you a diagram? No? Good.

"Now, Wannsee … 
that was the conference in late 1941 that set the Final Solution in motion.
Before then, it was mostly an alfresco atrocity—
Einsatzgruppen
,
mobile murder units, running around behind the front line machine-gunning
people. It was the Ahnenerbe-SS, with the Numerical Analysis Department founded
on the back of that unpublished work by Hilbert—he pointedly refused to
cooperate any further once he realised what was going on, by the way—which
provided the seed for the Wannsee Invocation. The Wannsee Conference was
attended by delegates from about twenty different Nazi organisations and
ministries. It set up the organisation of the Final Solution. The Ahnenerbe ran
it behind the scenes, using Karl Adolf Eichmann—at the time, head of
Section IV B4 of the Reich Main Security Office—as organisational head, a
kind of Nazi equivalent of General Leslie Groves. In the USA, General Groves was
a Corps of Engineers officer; he organised the massive logistical and
infrastructure mobilisation needed to build the Manhattan Project. In Vienna,
Eichmann, an SS
Obersturmbannführer
, was in charge of providing raw
material for the largest necromantic invocation in human history.

"The
goal of what the Ahnenerbe called Project Jotunheim, and what everyone else
called the Wannsee Invocation, was what we'd today designate the opening of a
class four gate—a large, bidirectional bridge to another universe where
the commutative operation, opening gates back to our own, is substantially
easier. A bridge big enough to take tanks, bombers, U-boats. Can you spell
'counter-strike'? We're not sure quite what their constraint requirements were,
or what the Wannsee Invocation was intended to accomplish, but they'd have been
pretty drastic; Wannsee cost the Nazi state a greater proportion of its wealth
than the Manhattan Project cost the US, and would have had similar or bigger
military implications if they'd succeeded. Of course, their spell was
grotesquely unoptimised; you could probably do it with a budget of a million
pounds for equipment and only use a couple of sacrifices if you had a proper
understanding of the theory. They tried to do a brute-force attack on the
problem, and failed—especially when the Allies got wind of it and bombed
the crap out of the big soul-capacitors at Peenumünde. But that's
not the point. They failed, and those deaths, all ten million or so of the
people they murdered in the extermination camps that fed the death spell, didn't
suffice to pull their heads out of the noose."

Mo shivers. "That's
horrible.
" She stands up and walks over to inspect the tea. "Hmm, needs
more milk." She leans against the counter next to me. "I can't believe Hilbert
would have cooperated with the Nazis willingly on that kind of project."

"He didn't. And when the Allies found out, they, um, demilitarised Germany
with extreme prejudice. In the occult field, anyway. None of the Ahnenerbe-SS
researchers from the Numerical Analysis Division survived; if the SOE death
squads didn't get them, it was the OSS or the NKVD. That's what the Helsinki
Protocol was about:
nobody
wanted to see systematic mass murder of
civilians adopted as a technique in strategic warfare, especially given some of
the more unpleasant and extreme effects the weapon Ahnenerbe-SS were working on
could give rise to. Like collapsing the false vacuum or letting vastly
superhuman alien intelligences gain access to our universe. This stuff made atom
bombs and ballistic missiles look harmless."

"Oh." She pauses. "Which is
why what happened to me is impossible, right? I think I begin to see. Curiouser
and curiouser … "

"I'm going to Amsterdam next Monday,
soon as I've booked a flight," I say slowly. "Want to come along?"