The Atrocity Archives (21 page)

I shake my head. The article dinged my search
filter's "phone home" bell by accumulating little keyword matches
until
it passed a threshold, not because it's obviously important. But
something nags at the back of my mind: there's seawater nearby,
graffiti in blood on the wall, an Iraqi connection.
Why Rotterdam?
Well, it's one of the main container-port gateways into Europe, that's
for starters. For seconds, it's less than fifty kilometres away.

There's no other real news. I log out and leave
the terminal; time to drink a coffee and get back to work.

Three hours later: "found
it," she says.

I look up from the report I'm reading. "Are you
sure?"

"Certain." I stand up and walk over. She's
leaning over an open drawer and her arms are tense as wires. I think
she'd be shaking if she wasn't holding herself still and stiff. I look
over her shoulder. The drawing is a geometry curve all right. Actually,
I've seen ones like this before. The aborted summoning
Dr. Vohlman demonstrated in front of the class that day—was it only a
few weeks ago?—looked quite similar. But that one was designed to open
a constrained information channel to one of the infernal realms. I
can't quite see where this one is directed, at least not without taking
it home and studying it with the aid of a protractor and a calculator,
but a quick glance tells me it's more than a simple speakerphone to
hell.

Here
we see a differential that
declares a function of tau, the rate of change of time with distance
along one of the Planck dimensions.
There
we see an admonition
that this circuit is not to be completed without a cage around it. (A
good thing the notation we use, and that of the Ahnenerbe, is derived
from the same source, or I wouldn't be able to figure it out.)
This
formula looks surprisingly modern, it's some sort of curve through the
complex number plane—each point along it is a different Julia set. And
that
is where the human sacrifice is wired into the diagram by its eyeballs
while still alive, for maximum bandwidth—

I blank for a second, flashing on the evil
elegance of the design. "Are you
sure
this is it?" I mumble.

"Of course I'm sure!" Mo snaps at me. "Do you
think I'd—" She stops. Takes a deep breath. Mutters something quietly
to herself, then: "What
is
it?"

"I'm not 100 percent certain," I say, carefully
placing the notepad I was reading from down on my chair and moving to
one side so I can inspect the diagram from a different angle, "but it
looks like a resonator map. A circuit designed to tune in on another
universe. This one is similar to our own, in fact it's astonishingly
close by; the energy barrier you have to tunnel through to reach it is
high enough that nothing less than a human sacrifice will do."

"Human sacrifice?"

"It doesn't take much energy to talk to a
demon," I explain. "They're pretty much waiting to hear from us, at
least the ones people mostly want to talk to. But they come from a long
way away—from universes with a very weak affinity to
our own. Information leakage doesn't imply an energy change in our own
world; it's concealed in the random noise. But if we try to talk to a
universe close to home there's a huge potential energy barrier to
overcome—this sort of prevents causality violations. The whole thing
is
mediated by intelligence—observers are required to collapse the wave
function—which is where the sacrifice comes in: we're eliminating an
observer. Done correctly, this lets us talk to a universe that isn't so
much next door as lying adjacent to our own, separated by a gap less
than the Planck length."

"Oh." She points at the map. "So this
thing … it's a very precise transformation through
the Mandelbrot set. Which you guys have used as a map onto a Linde
continuum, right? Why don't they just set up an n-dimensional
homogeneous matrix transformation? It's so much more intuitively
obvious."

"Uh—" She manages to surprise me at the
damnedest times. "I don't know. Have to read up on it, I guess."

"Well." She pauses for an instant and looks very
slightly disappointed, as if her star pupil has just failed a verbal
test. "This is very like what I saw. Got any suggestions for what to do
next, wise guy?"

"Yes. There's a photocopier upstairs. Let's call
the curator and run off a copy or two. Then we can get someone back
home to compare it to the photographs of the shipping container at that
murder site in Rotterdam. If they're similar we have a connection."

Our hotel has a bijou bar
and a breakfast room, but no restaurant; so it seems natural
that after running off our copies we should go home, head for our
respective rooms, freshen up, and head out on the town to find
somewhere to eat. (And maybe share a drink or two. Those hours in the
basement of horrors are going to give me bad dreams tonight, and I'd be
surprised if Mo is any better.) I spend half an hour soaking in the
bathtub with a copy of
Surreal Calculus and
the Navigation of Everett-Wheeler Continua
—hoping to brush up on
my
dinner-table patter—then dry myself, pull on a clean pair of chinos
and
an open-necked shirt, and head upstairs.

Mo is waiting at the bar with a cup of coffee
and a copy of the
Herald Tribune.
She's wearing the same
evening-out-on-the-town outfit as last time. She folds the newspaper
and nods at me. "Want to try that Indonesian place we passed?" I ask
her.

"Why not." She finishes the coffee quickly. "Is
it raining outside?"

"Wasn't last time I looked."

She stands up gracefully and pulls her coat on. "Let's go."

The nights are drawing in, and the evening air
is cool and damp. I'm still self-conscious about navigating around the
roads—not only do they run on the wrong side, but they've got separate
bike lanes everywhere, and, to make matters worse, separate tram lanes
that sometimes don't go in the same direction as the rest of the
traffic. It makes crossing the road an exercise in head-twitching, and
I nearly get mown down by a girl on a bicycle riding without lights in
the dusk—but we make it to the tram stop more or less intact, and Mo
doesn't laugh at me out loud. "Do you always jerk around like that?"

"Only when I'm trying to avoid the feral
man-eating mopeds. Is this tram—ah." Two stops later we get off and
head for that Indonesian place we passed earlier. They have a vacant
table, and we have a meal.

I turn on my new palmtop's antisound and Mo
talks to me over her satay: "Was that what you were hoping to find at
the museum?"

I dribble peanut sauce over a skewer before
replying. "It was what I was hoping
not
to find, really." She
has her back to the plateglass window and I have a decent view of the
main road behind her shoulder. Which is important, and I keep glancing
that way because I am on edge—our friendly neighbourhood abductors
seem
to go to work at dusk, and when all's said and
done this is a stakeout and Mo is the goat. I look back at her. She's
very decorative, for a goat: most goats don't wear ethnic tops, large
silver earrings, and friendly expressions. "On the other hand, at least
we know we're dealing with something profoundly unpleasant. Which means
that
Carnate Gecko
gets something solid to chew on and we've
got a lead to follow up."

"Assuming it doesn't follow
us
up
instead." Her expression clouds over in an instant: "Tell me the
truth,
Bob?"

My mouth turns dry: this is a moment I've been
dreading even more than the discovery in the basement. "What?"

"Why are they after me?"

Oh,
that
truth. I manage to breathe
again. "Your … research. And the stuff you were
really working on in the States."

"You know about that." She looks tense and I
suddenly wonder,
How many secrets are we keeping from each other?

"Angleton told me about it. Black Chamber
notified us when they deported you. Don't look so startled. About the
restricted theoretical work on probability manipulation—lucky vectors,
fate quantisation? It's all classified, but it's not—no, what I mean
to
say is, they don't like us running around on their turf, but
information sharing goes on at different levels."

I point my skewer at her and dissemble
creatively. "That stuff is fairly serious juju in our field. The
Pentagon plays with it. We've got it. A couple of other countries have
occult operations groups who make use of destiny entanglement fields.
But the likes of Yusuf Qaradawi can't get his hands on it without a
hell of a lot of reverse engineering, any more than the provisional IRA
ever got their hands on cruise missile technology. The difference is,
to build a cruise missile takes a ton of aerospace engineers, an
advanced electronics industry, and factories. Whereas to build a scalar
field that can locally boost probability coefficients attached to a
Wigner's Friend observer—say, to allow a suicide bomber to walk right
through a ring of bodyguards as if they aren't
there—takes a couple of theoreticians and one or two field ops. Occult
weapons are so much more
portable
that you can think in terms
of stealing the infrastructure—if you've got people who can understand
it. As most nongovernmental activist groups rely on cannon fodder so
dumb they have 'mom' and 'dad' tattooed on their knuckles so the cops
know who they belong to, that isn't usually much of a threat."

"But." She raises her last satay and swallows
the skewered morsel. "This time there is." I see motion outside the
window: see a familiar face, little more than a pale blur in the
darkness, glance inside as it walks past.

"Evidently," I mumble, feeling guilty.

"So your bosses decided to trail me in public
and see what they picked up while trying to identify the group by way
of the museum basement," she adds briskly. "How many people are
watching us, Bob?"

"At least one right now," I say, heart bouncing
around my rib cage. "That I know of, I mean. This is supposed to be a
full top-and-tail job, guards outside the hotel and round the clock
watch on your movements. Same as most politicians at risk of
assassination get. Not that we're expecting any suicide bombers," I
add
hastily.

She smiles at me warmly: "I'm
so
pleased
to know that. It really makes me feel secure."

I wince. "Can you suggest any alternatives?" I
ask.

"Not from your boss's—what's his name? Angleton?
His point of view. No, I don't suppose there is." A waiter appears
silently and removes our plates. She looks at me with an expression
that I can't read. "Why are
you
here, Bob?"

"Uh … " I pause to get my
thoughts in order. "Because it's my mess. I got roped in because I
didn't follow procedures and hang you out to dry in California, and
then I was there when things turned nasty, and this whole mess is
classified up to stupid levels because there's a turf war going on
between project management and operational executive—"

"That's not what I meant." She's silent for a
moment. Then: "Why did you break the rules in
Santa Cruz? Not that I object, but … "

"Because"—I inspect my wineglass—"I like you. I
don't think leaving people I like in the shit is a good way to behave.
And, frankly, I don't have a very professional attitude to my work. Not
the way the spooks think I should."

She leans forward. "Do you have a more
professional attitude to your work now?"

I swallow. "No, not really."

Something—a foot—rubs up and down my ankle and I
nearly jump out of my skin. "Good." She smiles in a way that turns my
stomach to jelly, and the waiter arrives with a precariously balanced
pile of dishes before I can say anything and risk embarrassing myself.
We just stare at each other until he's gone, and she adds: "I hate it
when people let their professionalism get in the way of real life."

We eat, and we talk about
people and things, not necessarily in complimentary terms. Mo
explains what it's like to be married to a New York lawyer and I
commiserate, and she asks me what it's like to live with a
manic-depressive psycho bitch from hell, and evidently she's been
talking to Pinky and Brains about things because I find myself
describing my relationship with Mhari with sufficient detachment that
it might as well be over—ancient history. And she nods and asks if
running into Mhari in Accounts and Payroll isn't embarrassing and this
leads to a long discourse on how working for the Laundry is about as
embarrassing as things can get: from the paper clip audits to the crazy
internal billing system, and about how I hoped that getting into field
ops would get me out from under Bridget's thumb, but no such luck. And
Mo explains about tenure track backbiting politics in small American
university departments, and about why you can kiss your career goodbye
if you publish too much—as well as too little—and about the different
ways in which a dual-income no-kiddies couple can
self-destruct so messily that I'm left thinking maybe Mhari isn't that
unusual after all.

We end up walking back to the hotel arm in arm,
and under a broken streetlamp she stops, wraps her arms around me, and
kisses me for what feels like half an hour. Then she rests her chin on
my shoulder, beside my ear. "This is so good," she whispers. "If only
we weren't being followed."

I tense. "We're—"

"I don't like being watched," she says, and we
let go of each other simultaneously.

"Me neither." I glance round and see a lone guy
on the street behind us looking in the window of a closed shop, and all
the romance flees the evening like gas from a punctured balloon.
"Shit."

"Let's just … go back. Hole
up and wait for morning."

"I guess."