The Atrocity Archives (40 page)

Andy looks at me and my blood runs cold. "I
think we'll have to see about that when we find them," I
extemporise,
trying to avoid telling her about the Audit Commission for the time
being; she might blow her stack completely if I have to explain how
they investigate malfeasance, and then I'd have to tell her that the
burning smell is a foreshadowing of what happens if she is ever found
guilty of disloyalty. (It normally fades a few minutes after the rite
of binding, but right now it's still strong.) "What are we
waiting
for?" I ask. "Let's go!"

In the beginning there was
the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA. And DERA was
where HMG's boffins hung out, and they developed cool toys like tanks
with plastic armour, clunky palmtops powered by 1980s chips and rugged
enough to be run over by a truck, and fetal heart monitors to help the
next generation of squaddies grow up strong. And lo, in the thrusting
entrepreneurial climate of the early nineties a new government came to
power with a remit to bring about the triumph of true socialism by
privatising the post office and air traffic control systems, and DERA
didn't stand much of a chance. Renamed QinetiQ by the same nameless
marketing genius who turned the Royal Mail into Consignia and Virgin
Trains into fodder for fuckedcompany-dot-com, the research agency was
hung out to dry, primped and beautified, and generally prepared for
sale to the highest bidder who didn't speak with a pronounced Iraqi
accent.

However … 

In addition to the ordinary toys, DERA used to
do development work for the Laundry. Q Division's pedigree stretches
back all the way to SOE's wartime dirty tricks department—poison pens,
boot-heel escape kits, explosive-stuffed sabotage rats, the whole nine
yards of James Bond japery. Since the 1950s, Q Division has kept the
Laundry in more esoteric equipment: summoning grids, basilisk guns,
Turing oracles, self-tuning pentacles, self-filling beer glasses, and
the like. Steadily growing weirder and more specialised by the year, Q
Division is far too sensitive to sell off—unlike most of QinetiQ's
research, what they do is classified so deep you'd need a bathyscaphe
to reach it. And so, while QinetiQ was being dolled up for the city
catwalk, Q Division was segregated and spun off, a little stronghold in
the sea of commerce that is forever civil service territory.

Detective Inspector Sullivan marches out of the
site office like a blank-faced automaton and crisply orders her pet
driver to take us to Site Able then to bugger off on
some obscure make-work errand. She sits stiffly in the front passenger
seat while Andy and I slide into the back and we proceed in
silence—nobody seems to want to make small talk.

Fifteen minutes of bumbling around red routes
and through trackless wastes of identical red brick houses embellished
with satellite dishes and raw pine fences brings us into an older part
of town, where the buildings actually look different and the cycle
paths are painted strips at the side of the road rather than separately
planned routes. I glance around curiously, trying to spot landmarks.
"Aren't we near Bletchley Park?" I ask.

"It's a couple of miles that way," says our
driver without taking his hands off the wheel to point. "You
thinking
of visiting?"

"Not just yet." Bletchley Park was the wartime
headquarters of the Ultra operation, the department that later became
GCHQ—the people who built the Colossus computers, originally used for
breaking Nazi codes and subsequently diverted by the Laundry for more
occult purposes. Hallowed ground to us spooks; I've met more than one
NSA liaison who wanted to visit in order to smuggle a boot heel full of
gravel home. "Not until we've visited the UK offices of
Dillinger
Associates, at any rate."

Dillinger Associates is the cover name for a
satellite office of Q Division. The premises turns out to be a
neoclassical brick-and-glass edifice with twee fake columns and
wilted-looking ivy that's been trained to climb the facade by dint of
ruthless application of plant hormones. We pile out of the car in the
courtyard between the dry fountain and the glass doors, and I
surreptitiously check my PDA's locator module for any sign of a match.
Nothing. I blink and put it away in time to catch up with Andy and
Josephine as they head for the bleached blonde receptionist who sits
behind a high wooden counter and types constantly, as unapproachably
artificial-looking as a shop window dummy.

"HelloDillingerAssociatesHowCanIHelpEwe?" She
flutters her eyelashes
at Andy in a bored,
professional way, hands never moving away from the keyboard of the PC
in front of her. There's something odd about her, but I can't quite put
my finger on it.

Andy flips open his warrant card. "We're here to
see Dr. Voss."

The receptionist's long, red-nailed fingers stop
moving and hover over the keyboard. "Really?" she asks,
tonelessly,
reaching under the desk.

"Hold it—" I begin to say, as Josephine takes a
brisk step forward and drops a handkerchief over the webcam on top of
the woman's monitor. There's a quiet
pop
and the sudden absence
of noise from her PC tips me off. I sidestep the desk and make a grab
for her just as Andy produces a pistol with a ridiculously fat barrel
and shoots out the camera located over the door at the rear of the
reception area. There's a horrible ripping sound like a joint of meat
tearing apart as the receptionist twists aside and I realise that she
isn't sitting on a chair at all—she's joined seamlessly at the hips to
a plinth that emerges from some kind of fat swivel base of
age-blackened wood, bolted to the floor with heavy brass pins in the
middle of a silvery metallic pentacle with wires trailing from one
corner back up to the PC on the desk. She opens her mouth and I can see
that her tongue is bright blue and bifurcated as she hisses.

I hit the floor shoulder first, jarringly hard,
and grab for the nearest cable. Those red nails are reaching down for
me as her eyes narrow to slits and she works her jaw muscles as if
she's trying to get together a wad of phlegm to spit. I grab the
fattest cable and give it a pull and she screams, high-pitched and
frighteningly inhuman.

What the fuck?
I think, looking up as
the red-painted claws stretch and expand, shedding layers of varnish as
their edges grow long and sharp. Then I yank the cable again, and it
comes away from the pentacle. The wooden box drools a thick,
blue-tinted liquid across the carpet tiles, and the screaming stops.

"Lamia," Andy says tersely. He strides over to
the fire door that opens onto the corridor beyond, raises the curiously
fat gun, and fires straight up. A purple rain drizzles back down.

"What's going on?" says Josephine, bewildered,
staring at the twitching, slowly dying receptionist.

I point my PDA at the lamia and ding it for a
reading. Cool, but nonzero. "Got a partial fix," I call
to Andy. "Where's everyone else? Isn't this place supposed to be
manned?"

"No idea." He looks worried. "If this is
what
they've got up front the shit's already hit the fan—Angleton wasn't
predicting overt resistance."

The other door bangs open of a sudden and a
tubby middle-aged guy in a cheap grey suit and about three day's worth
of designer stubble barges out shouting, "Who are you and what
do you
think you're doing here? This is private property, not a paintball
shooting gallery! It's a disgrace—I'll call the police!"

Josephine snaps out of her trance and steps
forward. "As a matter of fact, I
am
the
police," she says. "What's your name? Do you have a complaint, and if
so, what is
it?"

"I'm, I'm—" He focusses on the
no-longer-twitching demon receptionist, lolling on top of her box like
a murderous shop mannequin. He looks aghast. "Vandals! If
you've
damaged her—"

"Not as badly as she planned to damage us," says
Andy. "I think you'd better tell us who you are." Andy
presents his
card, ordering it to reveal its true shape: "By the authority
vested in
me—"

He moves fast with the geas and ten seconds
later we've got mister fat guy—actually Dr. Martin Voss—seated on one
of the uncomfortable chrome-and-leather designer sofas at one side of
reception while Andy asks questions and records them on a dictaphone.
Voss talks in a monotone, obviously under duress, drooling slightly
from one side of his mouth, and the stench of brimstone mingles with a
mouth-watering undertone of roast pork. There's
purple dye from Andy's paintball gun spattered over anything that might
conceal a camera, and he had me seal all the doorways with a roll of
something like duct tape or police incident tape, except that the
symbols embossed on it glow black and make your eyes water if you try
to focus on them.

"Tell me your name and position at this
installation."

"Voss. John Voss. Res-research team manager."

"How many members are there on your team? Who
are they?"

"Twelve. Gary. Ted. Elinor. John. Jonathan.
Abdul. Mark—"

"Stop right there. Who's here today? And is
anyone away from the office right now?" I plug away at my
palmtop,
going cross-eyed as I fiddle with the detector controls. But there's no
sign of any metaspectral resonance; grepping for a match to the person
who stole the Range Rover draws a blank in this building. Which is
frustrating because we've got his (I'm pretty sure it's a
he
)
boss right here, and there ought to be a sympathetic entanglement at
work.

"Everyone's here but Mark." He laughs a bit,
mildly hysterical. "They're all here but Mark. Mark!"

I glance over at Detective Inspector Sullivan,
who is detective inspecting the lamia. I think she's finally beginning
to grasp at a visceral level that we aren't just some bureaucratic
Whitehall paper circus trying to make her life harder. She looks
frankly nauseated. The silence here is eerie, and worrying.
Why
haven't the other team members come to find out what's going on?
I
wonder, looking at the taped-over doors.
Maybe they've gone out the
back and are waiting for us outside. Or maybe they simply can't come
out in daylight.
The smell of burning meat is getting stronger:
Voss seems to be shaking, as if he's trying not to answer Andy's
questions.

I walk over to the lamia. "It's not human," I
explain quietly. "It never was human. It's one of the things
they
specialise in. This building is defended by guards and wards, and this
is just part of the security system's front end."

"But she, she spoke … "

"Yes, but she's not a human being." I point to
the thick ribbon cable that connected the computer to the pentacle.
"See, that's a control interface. The computer's there to
stabilize and
contain a Dho-Nha circuit that binds the Dee-space entity here. The
entity itself—it's a lamia—is locked into the box which contains, uh,
other components. And it's compelled to obey certain orders. Nothing
good for unscheduled visitors." I put my hands on the lamia's
head and
work my fingers into the thick blonde hair, then tug. There's a noise
of ripping Velcro then the wig comes off to reveal the scaly scalp
beneath. "See? It's not human. It's a lamia, a type of demon
bound to
act as a front-line challenge/response system for a high security
installation with covert—"

I manage to get out of the line of fire as
Josephine brings up her lunch all over the incredibly expensive
bleached pine workstation. I can't say I blame her. I feel a little
shocky myself—it's been a really bad morning. Then I realise that Andy
is trying to get my attention. "Bob, when you're through with
grossing
out the inspector I've got a little job for you." He pitches
his voice
loudly.

"Yeah?" I ask, straightening up.

"I want you to open that door, walk along the
corridor to the second room on the right—not pausing to examine any of
the corpses along the way—and open it. Inside, you'll find the main
breaker board. I want you to switch the power off."

"Didn't I just see you splashing paint all over
the CCTV cameras in the ceiling? And, uh, what's this about corpses?
Why don't we send Dr. Voss—oh." Voss's eyes are shut and the
stink of
roast meat is getting stronger: he's gone extremely red in the face,
almost puffy, and he's shaking slightly as if some external force is
making all his muscles twitch simultaneously. It's my turn to struggle
to hang onto breakfast. "I didn't know anyone could make
themselves
do
that," I hear myself say distantly.

"Neither did I," says Andy, and that's the most
frightening thing
I've heard today so far. "There
must be a conflicted geas somewhere in his skull. I don't think I could
stop it even if—"

"Shit." I stand up. My hand goes to my neck
automatically but the pouch is empty. "No HOG." I
swallow. "Power. What
happens if I don't?"

"Voss's pal Mark McLuhan installed a dead man's
handle. You'd know all about that. We've got until Voss goes into brain
stem death and then every fucking camera in Milton Keynes goes live
with SCORPION STARE."

"Oh, you mean we die." I head for the door Voss
came through. "I'm looking for the service core, right?"

"Wait!" It's Josephine, looking pale. "Can't
you
go outside and cut the power there? Or phone for help?"

"Nope." I rip the first strip of sealing tape
away from the door frame. "We're behind Tempest shielding here,
and the
power is routed through concrete ducts underground. This is a Q
Division office, after all. If we could call in an air strike and drop
a couple of BLU-114/Bs on the local power substations that might
work"—I tug at the second tape—"but these systems
were designed to be
survivable." Third tape.

"Here," calls Andy, and he chucks something
cylindrical at me. I catch it one-handed, yank the last length of tape
with the other hand, and do a double-take. Then I shake the cylinder,
listen for the rattle of the stirrer, and pop the lid off.