The Atrocity Archives (44 page)

"Matrix management," I finally say, the
lightbulb coming on above my head at last. "The Laundry runs on
matrix
management. She saw you on the org chart as head of the
Counter-Possession Unit, not as private secretary
to … "
So that's how come he's got the
free run
of the director's office!

Josephine is aghast. "You call this a government
department?"

"Worse things happen in parliament every day of
the year, my dear." Now that the proximate threat is over,
Angleton
looks remarkably imperturbable; right now I doubt he'd turn her into a
frog even if she started yelling at him. "Besides, you are
aware of the
maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Here
we deal every day of the week with power sufficient to destroy your
mind. Even worse, we
cannot
submit to public oversight—it's
far
too dangerous, like giving atomic firecrackers to three-year-olds. Ask
Robert to tell you what he did to attract our attention later, if you
like." I'm still dripping and cold, but I can feel my ears
flush.

He focusses on her some more. "We can reinforce
the geas and release you," he adds quietly. "But I
think you can do a
much more important job here. The choice is yours."

I snort under my breath. She glances at me, eyes
narrowed and cynical. "If this is what passes for a field
investigation
in your department, you
need
me."

"Yes, well, you don't need to make your mind up
immediately. Detached duty, and all that. As for you, Bob," he
says,
with heavy emphasis on my name, "you have acquitted yourself
satisfactorily again. Now go and have a bath before you rot the
carpet."

"Bathroom's two doors down the hall on the
left," Andy adds helpfully from his station against the wall,
next to
the door: there's no doubt right now as to who's in charge here.

"But what happens now?" I ask, bewildered and a
bit shocky and already fighting off the yawns that come on when people
stop trying to kill me. "I mean, what's really
happened?
"

Angleton grins like a skull: "Bridget forfeited
her department, so the directors have asked me to put Andrew in acting
charge of it for the time being. Boris slipped up and failed to notice
McLuhan; he is, ah, temporarily indisposed. And as for you, a job well
done wins its natural reward—another job." His grin widens. "As I
believe the youth of today say, don't have a
cow … "

Fiction serves a variety of purposes. At its heart lies the simple art of storytelling—of
transferring ideas and sequences of events and pictures and people from
the storyteller's head to that of the audience solely by means of
words. But storytelling is a tool, and the uses to which a tool can be
put often differs from—and is more interesting than—the uses for
which
the tool was designed.

Fiction is spun from plausible lies, contrived
to represent an abreality sufficiently convincing that we do not
question what we hear—and there are different forms within fiction.
Consuming fiction is fun, an activity we engage in for recreation. So
why, then, do we have an appetite for forms of fiction that make us
profoundly uneasy, or that frighten us?

The chances are that if you've got to this
afterword, you've done so the long way round—by reading "The
Atrocity
Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle." This book
is a work of fiction, a
recreational product. Nobody forced you to read it by holding a gun to
your head, so presumably you enjoyed the experience. Now, at risk of
demystifying it, I'd like to pick over the
corpse, dissect its three major organs, and try to explain just how it
all fits together.

I'd like to begin by painting an anonymized
portrait of one of the greatest horror writers of the twentieth
century—a man whose writing was a major influence on me when I wrote
these stories.

D. was born in London in 1929, of working class
parents. A bright young man, he was educated at St. Marylebone Grammar
and William Ellis, Kentish Town, then worked as a railway clerk before
undergoing National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to
the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he studied art,
achieving a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Working as a
waiter in the evenings, he developed an interest in cooking. During the
1950s he travelled, working as an illustrator in New York City and as
an art director for a London advertising agency, before settling down
in Dordogne and starting to write. His first novel was an immediate
success, going on to be filmed (in a version starring Michael Caine);
subsequently he produced roughly a book a year for the rest of the
twentieth century. D. is somewhat reclusive, and was notorious at one
point for only communicating via Telex machine. He may also hold the
record for being the first writer ever to produce a novel entirely
using a word processor (around 1972).

D.'s work is coolly observed, with a meticulous
eye for background detail and subtle nuance. His narrators are usually
anonymous, their cynical inspection of organisation and situation
infused with a distaste or disdain for their circumstances that some of
the other characters find extremely annoying, if not ideologically
suspect. The world they find themselves trapped in is a maze of secret
histories and occult organisations, entities that
overlap with the world we live in, hiding beneath the surface like a
freezing cold pond beneath a layer of thin ice. And hovering in the
background over it all is a vast grey pall, a nightmare horror of
impending
Götterdämmerung
; for the
great game of D.'s
protagonists, breezily (or depressively) cynical though they might be,
is always played for the ultimate stakes.

D. is, of course Len Deighton, perhaps more
commonly regarded as one of the greatest masters of the spy thriller
(who, with such works as
The Ipcress File
,
Funeral in Berlin
,
and
Billion Dollar Brain
, is considered by some critics to be
the equal or even the superior of John Le Carré). And the
background to
his novels, the world that infused them with tension and provided the
stakes for the desperate gambles he described, was the Cold War.

The Cold War came to an abrupt end in 1991 with
the Soviet coup that led to the breakup of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Today, just a decade or so after it ended with a
whimper instead of a bang, it is increasingly hard to remember just
what it was like to live with a face-off of such enormous proportions
between two powers that represented the Manichean opposites of
industrial civilization. But those of us who grew up during the Cold
War have been as permanently scarred by it as any child who watched the
events of 9/11 live on CNN; because the Cold War applied a thin varnish
of horror atop any fictional exploration of diplomacy, spying, or
warfare.

Going back to the origins of the Cold War is a
difficult task; its roots grew from a variety of sources in the
fertile, blood-drenched soil of the early twentieth century. What is
not in question is the fact that, by 1968, the United States of America
and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had assembled—and pointed
at each other on a hair-trigger—arsenals unprecedented in the history
of warfare. During the First World War, all combatants combined
expended on the order of eleven million tons of explosives. This was
equivalent to the payload of a single B-52 bomber or Titan-2 ICBM of
the middle period Cold War, before smart
weapons and precision guidance systems began to replace the headsman's
axe of deterrence with a surgeon's scalpel.

Many of the children of the Cold War era grew up
doubting that they'd ever reach adulthood. Annihilation beckoned, in an
apocalyptic guise that was nevertheless anatomised far more precisely
than the visions of any mediaeval mystic. We knew the serial numbers,
megatonnage, accuracy, flight characteristics, and blast effects of our
nemesis, lurking sleeplessly beneath the waves or brooding in
launcher-erectors scattered across the tundra under a never-setting sun.

One of Len Deighton's skills was that he infused
the personal dilemmas and conflicts of his protagonists—little men and
women trapped in seedy, poorly paid bureaucratic posts—with the shadow
of the apocalypse. Cold War spy fiction was in some respects the
ultimate expression of horror fiction, for the nightmare was
real.
There's no need to hint darkly about forbidden knowledge and elder
gods, sleeping in drowned cities, who might inflict unspeakable
horrors, when you live in an age where the wrong coded message can
leave you blinded with your skin half-burned away in the wreckage of a
dead city barely an hour later. The nightmare was very real indeed, and
arguably it has never ended; but we have become blasè about
it, tap
dancing on the edge of the abyss because the great motor of ideological
rivalry that powered the Cold War has broken down and we're all
business partners in globalisation today and forevermore.

Spy fiction, like horror fiction, relies on the
mundanity of the protagonist to draw the reader into proximity with the
unnatural and occult horrors of alienation. We are invited to identify
with the likes of Harry Palmer (as Deighton named him in the film of
The
Ipcress File
—significantly, he has no name in the original novel),
a low-level civil servant whose occasional duties, in between filing
paperwork, involve visiting nuclear test sites, shepherding weapons
scientists, and hunting agents of the alien
power. Slowly sucked into a ghastly plot by the slow revelation of
occult, secret knowledge, Palmer is bewildered and confused and forced
to confront his worst fears in a world that the novelist slowly
discloses to be under a nightmarish threat from beyond the consensus
reality imposed by our society.

We've also become blasè about the apocalyptic
nightmares of an earlier age.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the great
pioneers of the spy thriller. Born in 1890, in Providence, Rhode
Island, he was the child of well-off parents. However, when Lovecraft
was three years old, his father was institutionalized, and Lovecraft
suffered a variety of psychosomatic ailments that prevented him
attending school. Despite these problems he was self-educated, taking
an interest in science as well as literature. After a nervous breakdown
in 1908, Lovecraft lived at home with his increasingly deranged mother.
Writing rapidly, he became a self-published amateur journalist, and in
the late nineteen-teens began to send out his stories for publication.

Lovecraft brought a cool, analytical eye to the
pursuit of espionage. In his writings we frequently encounter the
archetype of the scholar as spy, digging feverishly through libraries
and colossal archives in search of the lost key to the cryptic puzzle.
In
At the Mountains of Madness
Lovecraft prefigures the late
twentieth-century techno-thriller brilliantly, with his tale of highly
trained agents of an imperial power infiltrating a forbidden icy
continent—not a million miles from the brooding ice plateaux of
Siberia—in search of secret knowledge, at peril of death at the hands
of the vigilant defenders of the new order should they come to their
attention. Echoes of Lovecraft's obsessions abound in the more
developed thrillers of the Cold War, from Alistair MacLean's
Ice
Station Zebra
to the fervidly luscious garden of biological horrors
in Ian Fleming's
You Only Live Twice
(the book, not the film).

Are we confused yet? Just in case, I'll
summarise. Len Deighton was not an author of spy
thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War—era spy thrillers
rely on
the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of
terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane
characters play. And in contrast, H. P. Lovecraft was not an author of
horror stories—or not entirely—for many of his preoccupations, from
the
obsessive collection of secret information to the infiltration and
mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the
obsessions of the thriller writer.

(Before I stretch this analogy to breaking
point, I am compelled to admit that there
is
a difference
between the function and purpose of horror and spy fiction. Horror
fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an
uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and
may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows
us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining
secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats
that permeate their universe. So, although the basic dynamics of both
horror and spy fiction rely on the same sense of huge, impersonal
forces outside the control of the protagonists, who might initially be
ignorant of them, the outcome is often different.)

The fictional spy is very unlike the spy in real
life.

Every so often, Western intelligence agencies
advertise in public for recruits. The profile of the professional agent
is that of a government employee: quiet, diligent, punctilious about
filling out forms and obeying procedures. Far from having a mysterious
past, prospective employees of secret agencies have to provide a
complete and exhaustive list of everywhere they've ever lived, and
their background will be picked over in detail before the appointment
is approved. Far from being men of action, the
majority of intelligence community staff are office workers, a narrow
majority of them female, and they almost certainly never handle weapons
in the line of duty.

The picture changes when you contemplate
non-Western organisations such as the Iraqi Mukhabarat, agencies of
states that contemplate internal subversion with the cold eye of
totalitarian zeal. It changes in time of open warfare, and it changes
again when you examine Western agencies concerned with
counter-terrorism and organised crime duties, such as the FBI. But the
key insight to bear in mind is that in reality, the James Bond of the
movie series (and, to a lesser extent, Ian Fleming's original literary
wishfulfillment vehicle) is an almost perfect photographic negative of
the real intelligence agent. He is everything that a real spy cannot
afford to be—flashy, violent, high-rolling, glamorous, the centre of
attention.