The Atrocity Archives (41 page)

"Take cover!" I call. Then I open the door,
spritz the ceiling above me with green spray paint, and go to work.

I'm sitting in the lobby, guarding the lamia's corpse with a nearly empty can of paint and
trying not to fall asleep, when the OCCULUS team bangs on the door. I
yawn and sidestep Voss's blistered corpse—he looks like he's gone a
few
rounds with Old Sparky—then try to remember the countersign.
Ah,
that's it.
I pull away a strip of tape and
tug the door open and find myself staring up the snout of an H&K
carbine. "Is that a gun in your hand or are you just here to
have a
wank?" I ask.

The gun points somewhere else in a hurry. "Hey,
Sarge, it's the spod from Amsterdam!"

"Yeah, and someone's told you to secure the
area, haven't they? Where's Sergeant Howe?" I ask, yawning.
Daylight
makes me feel better—that, and knowing that there's backup. (I get
sleepy when people stop shooting at me. Then I have nightmares. Not a
good combination.)

"Over here." They're dressed in something not
unlike Fire Service HAZMAT gear, and the wagons are painted cheerful
cherry-red with luminous yellow stripes; if they weren't armed to the
teeth with automatic weapons you'd swear they were only here because
somebody had phoned in a toxic chemical release warning. But the pump
nozzles above the cabs aren't there to spray water, and that lumpy
thing on the back isn't a spotlight—it's a grenade launcher.

The inspector comes up behind me, staggering
slightly in the daylight. "What's going on?" she asks.

"Here, meet Scary Spice and Sergeant Howe.
Sarge, Scary, meet Detective Inspector Sullivan. Uh, the first thing
you need to do is to go round the site and shoot out every closed
circuit TV camera you can see—or that can see you. Got that? And
webcams. And doorcams. See a camera, smash it, that's the rule."

"Cameras. Ri-ight." Sergeant Howe looks mildly
skeptical, but nods. "It's definitely cameras?"

"Who
are
these guys?" asks Josephine.

"Artists' Rifles. They work with us," I say.
Scary nods, deeply serious. "Listen, you go outside, do
anything
necessary to keep the local emergency services off our backs. If you
need backup ask Sergeant Howe here. Sarge, she's basically sound and
she's working for us on this. Okay?"

She doesn't wait for confirmation, just shoves
past me and heads out into the daylight, blinking and shaking her head.
I carry on briefing the OCCULUS guys. "Don't worry about
anything that uses film, it's the closed circuit TV variety that's
hostile. And, oh, try to make sure that you are
never
in view
of more than one of 'em at a time."

"And don't walk on the cracks in the pavement or
the bears will get us, check." Howe turns to Scary Spice: "Okay, you
heard the man. Let's do it." He glances at me. "Anything inside?"

"We're taking care of it," I say. "If we
need
help we'll ask."

"Check." Scary is muttering into his throat mike
and fake firemen with entirely authentic fire axes are walking around
the bushes along the side of the building as if searching for signs of
combustion. "Okay, we'll be out here."

"Is Angleton in the loop? Or the captain?"

"Your boss is on his way out here by chopper.
Ours is on medical leave. You need to escalate, I'll get you the
lieutenant."

"Okay." I duck back into the reception area then
nerve myself to go back into the development pool at the rear of the
building, below the offices and above the labs.

Site Able is a small departmental satellite
office, small for security reasons: ten systems engineers, a couple of
manager dogsbodies, and a security officer. Most of them are right here
right now, and they're not going anywhere. I walk around the service
core in the dim glow of the emergency light, bypassing splashes of
green paint that look black in the red glow. The octagonal developer
pool at the back is also dimly illuminated—there are no windows, and
the doors are triple-sealed with rubber gaskets impregnated with fine
copper mesh—and some of the partitions have been blown over. The whole
place is ankle deep in white mist left over from the halon dump system
that went off when the first bodies exploded—good thing the air
conditioning continued to run or the place would be a gas trap. The
webcams are all where I left them, in a trash can at the foot of the
spiral staircase up to level one, cables severed with my multitool just
to make sure nobody tries to plug them back in again.

The victims—well, I have to step over one of
them to get up the staircase. It's pretty gross but I've seen dead
bodies before, including burn cases, and at least this was fast. But I
don't think I'm going to forget the smell in a hurry. In fact, I think
I'm going to have nightmares about it tonight, and maybe get drunk and
cry on Mo's shoulder several times over the next few weeks until I've
got it out of my system. But for now, I shove it aside and step over
them. Got to keep moving, that's the main thing—unless I want there to
be more of them. And on my conscience.

At the top of the staircase there's a narrow
corridor and partitioned offices, also lit by the emergency lights. I
follow the sound of keyclicks to Voss's office, the door of which is
ajar. Potted cheese plants wilting in the artificial light, puke-brown
antistatic carpet, ministry-issue desks—nobody can accuse Q Division's
brass of living high on the hog. Andy's sitting in front of Voss's
laptop, tapping away with a strange expression on his face. "OCCULUS is
in place," I report. "Found anything
interesting?"

Andy points at the screen. "We're in the wrong
fucking town," he says mildly.

I circle the desk and lean over his shoulder. "Oh shit."

"You can say that again if you like." It's an
email Cc'd to Voss, sent over our intranet to a Mike McLuhan. Subject:
meeting. Sender: Harriet.

"Oh shit. Twice over. Something stinks. Hey, I
was supposed to be in a meeting with her today," I say.

"A meeting?" Andy looks up, worried.

"Yeah. Bridget got a hair up her ass about
running a BSA-authorised software audit on the office, the usual sort
of make-work. Don't know that it's got anything to do with this,
though."

"A
software
audit? Didn't she know
Licencing and Compliance handles that on a blanket department-wide
basis? We were updated on it about a year ago."

"We were—" I sit down heavily on the cheap
plastic visitor's chair. "What are the chances this McLuhan guy
put the
idea into Harriet's mind in the first place?
What are the chances it
isn't
connected?"

"McLuhan. The medium is the message. SCORPION
STARE. Why do I have a bad feeling about this?" Andy sends me a
worried
look.

" 'Nother possibility, boss-man. What if
it's an internal power play? The software audit's a cover, Purloined
Letter style, hiding something fishy in plain sight where nobody will
look at it twice until it's too late."

"Nonsense, Bridget's not clever enough to blow a
project wide open just to discredit—" His eyes go wide.

"Are you sure of that? I mean,
really
and
truly
sure? Bet-your-life sure?"

"But the body count!" He's shaking his head in
disbelief.

"So it was all a prank and it was meant to begin
and end with Daisy, but it got a bit out of control, didn't it? These
things happen. You told me the town police camera network's capable of
end-to-end tracking and zone hand-off, didn't you? My guess is someone
in this office—Voss, maybe—followed me to the car pound and realised
we'd found the vehicle McLuhan used to boost Daisy. Stupid wankers, if
they'd used one of their own motors we'd not be any the wiser, but they
tried to use a stolen one as a cutout. So they panicked and dumped
SCORPION STARE into the pound, and it didn't work, so they panicked
some more and McLuhan panicked even more—bet you he's the go-between,
or even the guy behind it. What is he, senior esoteric officer? Deputy
site manager? He's in London so he planted the crazy blackmail threat
then brought down the hammer on his own coworkers. Bet you he's a smart
sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat
and no knickers—and willing to shed blood without a second thought if
it's to defend his position."

"Damn," Andy says mildly as he stands up. "Okay,
so. Internal politics, stupid bloody prank organised to show up
Angleton, they use idiots to run it so your cop finds the trail, then
the lunatic in chief cuts loose and
starts killing people. Is that your story?"

"Yup." I nod like my neck's a spring. "And
right
now they're back at the Laundry doing who the fuck knows what—"

"We've got to get McLuhan nailed down fast,
before he decides the best way to cover his tracks is to take out head
office. And us." He smiles reassuringly. "It'll be
okay, Angleton's on
his way in. You haven't seen him in action before, have you?"

Picture a light
industrial/office estate in the middle of anytown with four
cherry-red fire pumps drawn up, men in HAZMAT gear combing the brush, a
couple of police cars with flashing light bars drawn up across the road
leading into the cul-de-sac to deter casual rubberneckers. Troops
disguised as firemen are systematically shooting out every one of the
security cameras on the estate with their silenced carbines. Others,
wearing police or fire service uniforms, are taking up stations in
front of every building—occupied or otherwise—to keep the people
inside
out of trouble.

Just another day at the office, folks,
nothing to see here, walk on by.

Well, maybe not. Here comes a honking great
helicopter—the Twin Squirrel from the Met's ASU that I was in the
other
night, only it looks a lot bigger and scarier when seen from a couple
hundred feet in full daylight as it settles in on the car park, leaves
and debris blowing out from under the thundering rotors.

The chopper is still rocking on its skids when
one of the back doors opens and Angleton jumps down, stumbling
slightly—he's no spring chicken—then collects himself and strides
toward us, clutching a briefcase. "Speak," he tells me,
voice barely
raised to cover the rush of slowing rotors.

"Problem, boss." I point to the building: "Andy's still inside
confirming the worst but it
looks like it started as a fucking stupid interdepartmental prank; it
went bad, and now one of the perps has wigged out and gone
postal."

"A prank." He turns those icy blue peepers on me
and just for a fraction of a second I'm not being stared at by a
sixty-something skinny bald guy in a badly fitting suit but by a
walking skeleton with the radioactive fires of hell burning balefully
in its eye sockets. "You'd better take me to see Andrew. Fill
me in on
the way."

I'm stumbling over my tongue and hurrying to
keep up with Angleton when we make it to the front desk, where Andy's
busy giving the OCCULUS folks cleanup directions and tips for what to
do with the broken lamia and the summoning altars in the basement.
"Who's—oh, it's you. About time." He grins. "Who's holding the fort?"

"I left Boris in charge," Angleton says mildly,
not taking exception at Andy's brusque manner. "How bad is
it?"

"Bad." Andy's cheek twitches, which is a bad
sign: all his confidence seems to have fled now that Angleton's
arrived. "We need to—damn."

"Take your time," Angleton soothes him. "I'm
not
going to eat you." Which is when I realise just how scared
I
am, and if I'm half out of my tree what does that say about Andy? I'll
give Angleton this much, he knows when not to push his subordinates too
hard. Andy takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, then tries again.

"We've got two loose ends: Mark McLuhan, and a
John Doe. McLuhan worked here as senior occult officer, basically an
oversight role. He also did a bunch of other stuff for Q Division that
took him down to Dansey House in a liaison capacity. I can't
believe
how badly we've slipped up on our vetting process—"

"Take your time," Angleton interrupts, this time
with a slight edge to his voice.

"Sorry, sorry. Bob's been putting it together."
A nod in my direction. "McLuhan is working with a John Doe
inside the
Laundry to make us look bad via a selective disclosure leak—basically
one that was intended to be written off as bad-ass forteana, nothing
for anyone but the black helicopter crowd to pay any attention to,
except that it would set you up to look bad. I've found some not very
good email from Bridget inviting McLuhan down to headquarters, some
pretext to do with a software audit. Really fucking stupid stuff that
Bob can do the legwork on later. But what I
really
think is
happening is, Bridget arranged this to make you look bad in support of
a power play in front of the director's office."

Angleton turns to me: "Phone head office. Ask
for Boris. Tell him to arrest McLuhan. Tell him, SHRINKWRAP. And,
MARMOSET." I raise an eyebrow. "Now, lad!"

Ah, the warm fuzzies of decisive action. I head
for the lamia's desk and pick up the phone and dial 666; behind me Andy
is telling Angleton something in a low voice.

"Switchboard?" I ask the sheet of white noise. "I want Boris.
Now.
"
The Enochian metagrammar
parsers do their
thing and the damned souls or enchained demons or whatever on
switchboard hiss louder then connect the circuit. I hear another ring
tone. Then a familiar voice.

"Hello, Capital Laundry Services, system support
department. Who are you wanting to talk to?"

Oh shit.
"Hello, Harriet," I say,
struggling to sound calm and collected. Getting Bridget's imp at this
juncture is not a good sign, especially when she and Boris are renowned
for their mutual loathing. "This is a red phone call. Is Boris
about?"