The Atrocity Archives (31 page)

"But plutonium isn't carbon—"

"No, but the explosive lenses are made of RDX,
which is a polynitrated aromatic hydrocarbon compound. You turn 1
percent of the RDX charge into silicon and it will go bang very
enthusiastically indeed. If we offset it to one side like
this
"—I
nudge the chair a couple of centimeters—"one side of the A-bomb's
explosive lenses predetonate, totally out of sequence, causing a
fizzle. Imagine a giant's fist, squeezing the plutonium core; now
imagine he's left his thumb off the top. Molten plutonium squirts out
instead of compressing around the initiator and going bang. You get a
messy neutron pulse but no supercriticality excursion. Maybe explosive
disassembly of the case, and a mess of radiation, but no mushroom
cloud."

Alan glances at his watch. "Nine minutes. You'd
better be going."

"Nine—what do you mean?"

He looks at me tiredly. "Laddie, unless there's
a timer on this basilisk gadget,
someone
has to stay here and
pull the trigger. You're a civilian, but I signed up for the Queen's
shilling."

"Bullshit!" I glare at him. "You've got a wife
and kids. If anyone's disposable around here it's me."

"Firstly, I seem to remember you saying you'd do
whatever I said before you came along on this road trip. Secondly, you
understand what's going on: you're too bloody important to leave
behind. And thirdly, it's my job," he says heavily. "I'm a soldier.
I'm
paid to catch bullets, or neutrons. You're not.
So unless you've got some kind of magic remote controller for—"

I blink rapidly. "Let me look at it again," I
say.

The basilisk gun is a bunch of customised IC
circuits bolted to a pair of digital camcorders. I lean closer. The
good news is they have fast interfaces. The bad news—

Shit. No infrared. The TV remote control program
on my palmtop won't work. I straighten up. "No," I say.

"Get the hell out of here then," says Alan. "You've got six
minutes. I'm going to wait sixty seconds after you
leave the room, then hit the button." He sounds very calm. "Go on,
now.
Unless you think losing two lives is better than losing one."

Shit.
I punch the door frame twice,
oblivious to the pain in my wrist.

"Go!" he yells.

Upstairs, I pause in the guardroom, about to
ignite one of the two Hands of Glory that are waiting for me on the
table. I wonder if I'm far enough away from the bomb. (That American
scientist—Harry Dagnian, wasn't it?—who did something similar by
accident in the Manhattan Project: dropped a neutron reflector on top
of a weapon core during an experiment. He died a couple days later, but
a guard just ten feet away wasn't affected.) There's a muffled thud
that I feel through the soles of my boots; a split second later I hear
a noise like a door slamming.

I hear my pulse racing erratically. I hear it,
therefore I am still alive. I heard the explosion, therefore the bomb
fizzled. There will be no nuclear fireball to energize the conquest
dreams of the ancient evil that lurks in this pocket universe. All I
have to do is pick up the Hand and walk back to the slowly evaporating
gate before it closes … 

A minute passes. Then I put down the Hand of
Glory and wait for another minute. It's no good. My feet carry me back
inside and I fasten down my faceplate, switching to my canned air
supply as I head down the corridor that leads to the staircase.

At the top of the stairs I key my microphone. "Alan? Are you
there?"

A momentary pause, then: "Right you are." He
chuckles hoarsely. "Always knew I'd die in my own bed, laddie."
Another
pause. "Make sure you're buttoned up before you come downstairs. This
isn't a sight most people ever get to see."

Three days later I am back
in London. Most of the intervening time seems to be spent in
interview rooms, doing debriefs and going over every last aspect of
events. When I'm not talking myself hoarse I am fed institutional food
and sleep in a spartan institutional bed. Officer's Mess or something.
The flight back to London is an anticlimax, and I go straight from the
airport to Alan's hospital bed.

It's in a closed bay off a ward devoted to
tropical diseases in one of the big London teaching hospitals. There's
a staff nurse on the desk out in front, and a police officer on the
door. "Hi," I say. "I'm here to see Alan Barnes."

The nurse barely looks up. "No visitors for Mr.
Barnes." He goes back to studying someone else's medication chart.

I lean on the front of the nursing station. "Look," I say. "Personal
friend
and
coworker. It's visiting
hours. Please."

This time the nurse looks at me. "You really
don't want to see him," he says. The cop straightens up and takes
notice of me for the first time.

I pull my warrant card. "How is he?" I ask.

The nurse exhales sharply. "He's stable for now
but we may have to move him to the ICU at short notice; it isn't
pretty." He glances at the cop. "We can arrange to call you if
there's
any change."

I glance at the officer of the law, who is
inspecting my warrant card as if it's the clue to a particularly nasty
murder: "Are you going to let me in or not?"

The cop looks at me sharply. "You can go in, Mr.
Howard." She opens the door and steps inside first, not bothering to
give me back the card.

"No more than five minutes!" calls the nurse.

It's a small room with no window; fluorescent
lights and a trolley bed surrounded by machines that have far too many
dials and knobs for comfort. A trolley beside the bed is draining bags
of transparent fluid into the arm of the bed's occupant by way of a
vicious-looking cannula. The bed's occupant is reclining on a mound of
pillows; his eyelids flicker open as I come in. He smiles. "Bob."

"I came as soon as they let me go," I say. I
reach into my inner pocket for the card, barely noticing the
policewoman behind me tense; when she sees the envelope she relaxes
again. "How are you feeling?"

"Like shit." He grins cadaverously. "Like the
world's worst-ever case of Montezuma's revenge. Have you been all
right, lad?"

"Can't complain much. They haven't given me a
chance to talk to Mo, and I spent the first day back being prodded by
the witch doctors—I think they liked the colour of my bile or
something." I'm babbling.
Get a grip.
"Guess there was enough
concrete between you and me. Have they let you talk to, uh, Hillary? Is
the food okay?"

"Food—" He turns his head to look at the cannula
in his arm. His skin is brown and ulcerated and seems to be hanging
loose, patchy white flakes falling from the underlying reddish tissue.
"Seem to be eating through a hose these days, Bob." He closes his
eyes. "Not seen Hillary. Shit, I'm tired. Feverish,
too, some of the time." His eyes open again. "You'll tell her?"

"Tell her what, Alan?"

"Just tell her."

The policewoman clears her throat behind me. "Yeah, I'll tell
her," I say. Alan doesn't give any sign of showing
that he's heard me; he just nodded right off, like an eighty-year-old
on Valium. I open the envelope and put the card in it on his bedside
table, where he'll see it when he wakes up. If. He always knew he'd die
in his own bed.
Tell Hillary?

I turn and walk through the door, blind to the
world. The cop follows me out, shutting it carefully. "Do you know who
did that to him, Mr. Howard?" she asks quietly.

I stop. Clench my fists behind my back. "Sort
of," I say quietly. "They won't be doing it to anyone else, if that's
what you're asking. If you'll give me back my card now, I have to go in
to the office and make sure someone's told his wife where he is. I take
it you'll let her in?"

She glances at the nurse. "Up to him." She nods
at me, then some misplaced piece of Metropolitan Police customer
relations training kicks in on autopilot: "Have a nice day, now."

I check into the Laundry via
the back door. It's three in the afternoon and a light rain is
falling: mild breeze from the southeast, cloud cover at 90 percent, a
beautiful match for my mood. I head for my cubicle and find it
unchanged from when I was last here, more than a week ago: there's a
coffee cup containing some amazingly dead dregs, a pile of unread
unclassified memos, and a bunch of yellowing Post-it notes saying
SEE ME
plastered all over my terminal and
keyboard.

I drop into the chair in front of the terminal
and poke listlessly at the decaying hayrick of email that's cluttering
up my user account. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a lot from more
than one day into the trip. That's kind of
strange: I should be deluged with stupid nonsense from HR, requests for
software upgrades from the losers in Accounting, and peremptory reports
for the GDP of Outer Mongolia in 1928 from Angleton—well, not the
latter.

I kick back for a moment and stare at the
ceiling. There are a couple of coffee-coloured stains up there, relics
of who-knows-what mishap, deep in the Precambrian era of Laundry
history. Rorschach-like, they call up the texture of Alan's skin:
brown, loose, looking burned from the inside out. I glance away. For a
moment even the fossil Post-it notes are preferable to thinking about
what I have to do next.

Then the door opens. "Robert!" I look round.
It's Harriet, and I know something's wrong because Bridget is lurking
behind her, face a contemplative middle-management mask, and she's
clutching a bunch of blue-covered files. "Where've you been hiding?
We've been looking for you for days."

"I don't know if you're cleared," I respond
wearily. I think I can see what's coming.

"Would you please come with us?" says Bridget,
voicing the order as a request. "We have some things to talk about."

Harriet backs out of the cramped doorway and I
haul myself upright and let them march me down the corridor and up the
stairs to a vacant conference room, all dusty pine veneer and dead
flies trapped between perpetually closed Venetian blinds. "Have a
seat." There are four chairs at the table, and as I glance round I
notice that we seem to have picked up an escort: Eric the Ancient
Security Officer, a dried-up prune of a former RAF sergeant whose job
is to lock doors, confiscate papers left lying on unoccupied desks, and
generally make a pestilential nuisance of himself—a sinecure for the
irreformably officious.

"What's this about?" I place both hands
palms-down on the table.

"It's about several things, as a matter of
fact," begins Harriet. "Your controller and I have been worried for
some months now about your timekeeping." She
plonks a thin blue file down on the table. "We note that you're seldom
in the department before 10
A
.
M
., and your observance of core hours falls
short of the standard expected of an employee."

Bridget picks up the tag-team prosecution: "Now,
we understand that you're used to working occasional off-shift hours,
being called out on those odd occasions when there's a problem with one
of the servers. But you haven't been filling out variance form R-70
each time you've put in these hours, and without an audit trail I'm
afraid we can't automatically accept requests for time off in lieu.
According to our records you've been taking off an average of two
unscheduled days per month—which could get us, your supervisors, into
serious trouble if Audit Bureau were to get interested."

Harriet clears her throat. "Simply put, we can't
cover for you anymore.
In
fact—"

Bridget is shaking her head. "This latest
escapade is unacceptable, too. You've absented yourself from work for
five consecutive working days without following either the approved
sick/leave-of-absence procedure or applying to your department head for
a holiday variance or even compassionate leave. This sort of thing is
not only antisocial—think of the additional work you've made for
everybody else who's been covering your absence!—but it's a gross
violation of procedures." She pronounces the last phrase with the sort
of distaste usually reserved by the tabloid press for ministers caught
soliciting on Hampstead Heath. "We simply cannot overlook this."

Harriet nods. "And then there's what Eric found
in your mailbox."

By this time my neck is aching as I try to keep
my eyes on all three of them at the same time.
What the hell's
going on?
Harriet and Bridget administering a procedural mugging is
all very well, and I'm damned if I'll let them plant a written warning
on my personnel file without an appeal. But Eric's the departmental
security officer. What's he in here for?

"Very bad indeed, young fellow," he quavers. And
now Bridget barely tries to conceal a triumphant, somewhat feral grin
as she plants a raw printout of an email message on the tabletop.
"Subject: Some Notes Toward a Proof of Polynomial Completeness in
Hamiltonian Networks." My mind goes blank for a moment, then I
remember
the black-bag job, Croxley Industrial Estate, the hum of servers at
midnight and security guards hiding under their desks. And my stomach
goes icy cold.

"What's this about?" asks Bridget.

"I think you've got some explaining to do,"
opines Eric, peering at me with watery blue eyes like an elderly
vulture contemplating a wildebeest that's just made the terminal
mistake of drinking from a poisoned watering hole.

My stomach feels like ice, but the sense of
gathering outrage at the back of my head is like a red-hot band. As I
see them watching me with varied degrees of expectancy I feel a flash
of raw anger: I press my hands down on the tabletop because I really
feel like punching somebody in the face, and that wouldn't be the right
way to handle this situation.

"You have no need to know," I say as firmly as
possible.