The Rhesus Chart (29 page)

“No, Bob, you deduced that for yourself. You may or may not be correct.
I do not know.
However, I would strongly advise you to investigate further.”

“So, er . . . who is he?”

Angleton crosses his arms. He looks annoyed. “I don’t know.”

“
You
don’t know?” I stare at him in disbelief.

“I am not omnipotent, boy. Or omniscient. We are discussing the possible existence of a
very
powerful sorcerer, immune from K syndrome and probably more than a century old, who has encrusted our organizational premises with an obfuscatory geas going back decades. They predate my arrival and probably know enough about me to stay out of my way.” His expression of irritation deepens.

“Okay, so let’s say there
is
a long-term PHANG in the Laundry, and you don’t know who he is—surely at least you have a suspect in mind?” (Yes,
he
. If we’re talking about someone older than Angleton, we’re talking about a prewar sorcerer. Pre–
First
World War.)

Angleton shakes his head. “I have suspicions. But I don’t want to share them with you; they might lead you down a blind alley.”

“If you insist.” I pause. “So we have this invisible blood-sucking mole within the organization. But there’s also another long-term PHANG outside the big tent, and he’s lately set up the Scrum to, to start a fight with our PHANG?” Angleton nods. “But they must have been doing this on and off for decades!”

“Correct, Bob. We are discussing some of the world’s deadliest magician-assassins; if you meet our in-house monster you should be at pains not to underestimate him, however meek and mild he might seem. They play their vicious games using a range of proxies. The Scrum are proxies.
You
or
I
might be proxies, without ever knowing it. You might consider investigating where the suggestion to look for K syndrome clusters using the NHS data warehouse originated—but I expect he’s covered his traces well.

“The key facts are that he works with what he knows, and because he is embedded in the Laundry, what he knows is
us
. So: let us suppose that our in-house monster became aware that his long-term adversary was beginning a series of experiments intended to eventually give him an army of tractable vampire minions. (My understanding is that such attempts have hitherto always failed, because viable vampires are anything but tractable.) In response, our man inserted Ms. Murphy into the adversary’s experiment, and arranged for you to find her: a stroke of pure genius. One might even speculate that he planned it as a move to steal his rival’s toy-box, the baby PHANGs. But now the adversary can’t help but realize he’s being played—and sooner or later he’ll retaliate. Either by throwing his toys on the floor, or by upsetting the game board.”

“Wait, what—” My head’s spinning.

Angleton turns back to his Memex. “Get out of here, boy, I’ve got a job to do. Call me if you need my help, but not until you’re in over your head.”

I stand up. “Be like that!” I vent. The Eater of Souls doesn’t dignify my tantrum with his attention. I leave.

 • • • 

IT IS ONLY AS I PUT MY HAND ON MY OFFICE DOOR’S HANDLE
that I realize I’ve forgotten something, and I’m too late to cancel the arm movement that pushes down and shoves the door partway open before I complete it.

Someone—presumably Trish—has installed feline conveniences.

There is an object on the floor that resembles an animal carrier at first, except it’s got a plastic swing-door on the front. After a moment I realize it’s a covered litter tray. There are a couple of plastic bowls at the other side of the room, one containing water and the other half-full with dry brown kibble. It looks like breakfast cereal but smells revolting. Or maybe (a horrible thought) the smell’s coming from the litter tray. I head for my desk and see a receipt on my computer keyboard as I sit down—

“WAAAOW!”

An air raid siren goes off under my arse. I jackknife forward, and a bolt of black furry lightning hurtles out from under me and lands in the corner by the door, its back arched and tail fluffed out like a bog-brush. It gives me the evil eye as I hyperventilate, then slowly lower myself back down onto my chair seat.

“That’s all right, pay no attention to me, just make yourself at home,” I tell the self-propelled whoopee cushion, then audit the itemized receipt with a sinking heart. Judging from the bottom line, cats fall somewhere between a new Porsche and a used Lamborghini in running costs, and I’ve got a nasty suspicion that I’m not going to be able to expense this claim. I mean, I might be able to concoct an experimental protocol that involves hosting one all-black specimen of
Felis catus
in the lap of luxury before sacrificing it on a summoning grid—but I suspect that would annoy Trish, and one should always avoid pissing off the departmental secretary.

The potential sacrifice-to-be stares at me mistrustfully, then sits down and begins to wash its left hind leg, which it stretches out in front of it. I examine it from a safe distance. It’s a generic short-haired black cat, slightly tattered about the edges and a bit skinny. There’s a kink in its tail as if it was broken once. Gradually the blob of darkness works its tongue into the gaps between its claws, and I realize there’s something odd about its paw. Cats don’t have opposable thumbs, do they? Unless there’s some medical condition . . .

I shake my head, unlock the computer, and haul down a shiny new VM from our classified information repository. (It seems a bit excessive to create and download a whole new Windows Vista guest instance in order to open a new notepad document and type a few notes, but that’s how we’re supposed to roll these days.) I’m partway through typing up some notes on the DRESDEN RICE mess and Angleton’s advice pertaining thereto when there’s a knock on the door. “Come in!” I call. As the door opens, the cat looks up in sudden alarm and scrambles for cover under my desk.
Oh great.
It’s Andy. “Well?” he asks, with the expression of a friend who can’t quite bring himself to ask how the blind date he fixed up on a dare went.

“Come in and sit down,” I suggest, “but watch your feet.”

“Watch for”—Andy spots the litter tray—“what?”

“It’s the stray that was hanging around the dumpsters; it followed me in.” Andy sits down. “I was going to take it to the Cat and Dog Home at lunchtime but Trish has unilaterally decided I’m adopting it.”

“She probably thought you needed the humanizing touch,” Andy agrees as he sits down. There’s another knock on the door.

“Yes?” I call.

“Hello, Bob. Got a minute?” It’s Pete. He spots Andy: “Oh, hello.”

I give up any thought of getting any actual work done, shut down and save the VM, and push my keyboard away. “You might as well both make yourselves at home. Pay no attention to the hairy squatter, it’s going to the Cat and Dog—”

“Oh
hello
,” says Pete, kneeling and peering under my desk. “Aren’t
you
a fine one?”

He is answered by a curious chirrup. I glance at Andy.

“Has it been positively vetted?” he asks.

“Very droll.” The vicar is allowing his index finger to be sniffed from the shadows.

“I’m serious,” Andy adds. “Strange animals, lurking around our back door, waiting to be taken in—could it be bugged?”

“What, you mean like the crazy CIA project from the sixties? Electric Kitty? No, Acoustic Kitty?”

Andy shrugs. “Or like our paper clips. Destiny-entangle it with a littermate, keep littermate in a summoning grid, anything one cat hears the other cat hears also. You just have to figure out a way of making it sing.”

“Well
that’s
a—”

Pete stands up, holding a buzzing black furball. He looks at me accusingly. “You are not going to take Spooky here to a cat shelter! You are going to take—er—
her
home and give her the love and affection she so obviously deserves.” He scritches the little monster under its chin: it buzzes like a badly grounded transformer.

I close my eyes for a moment and open my inner eye. I stare at Pete, and the thing in his arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (
Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t this one
have
thumbs?
)

I open my eyes again. “Andy, it’s just a cat, not a Black Chamber spy wearing a furry suit. Pete, we can talk about what to do with Spooky later.” (I can tell the name’s going to stick: What else do you call a stray cat that decides to adopt a secret intelligence agency?) “Drag up a pew and I’ll give you an update on the meeting.” Pete, despite his extremely probationary status, has got clearance for OPERA CAPE by default, if only because it would be impossible for him to mentor Alex without it, and Andy was in on the original Code Blue.

“The DRESDEN RICE committee is supposed to formulate policy for dealing with, ah, PHANG syndrome as they’re calling it. From a human resources and health and safety perspective. First it was nobbled from the top down—the only person on it with OPERA CAPE clearance was yours truly, and it was over-endowed with WOMBATs.” (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.))) “So I complained to Lockhart”—Andy looks at me sharply, but Pete, bless his little cotton socks, shows no sign of awareness, being focussed entirely on fulfilling the hedonistic whims of a furry egomaniac with a brain the size of a walnut—“who said he’d investigate. Anyway, the upshot is that the DRESDEN RICE chair was replaced by someone who does indeed have OPERA CAPE clearance . . . Mhari.”

“Mhari.” Andy frowns: it was a long time ago. “Wasn’t she your—”

“Never mind that,” I say hastily, “the point is, they just handed Dracula the keys to the blood bank.”

“Why would they do that?” Pete looks up, interested, to the apparent displeasure of his lap fungus. “For that matter, who are the ‘they’ you speak of?”

“Management,” I say hastily, just as Andy says “Mahogany Row.” I send him a dark look.

“What’s Mahogany Row?” asks Pete.

“Management,”
I say firmly. Andy looks as if he’s about to contradict me, then gets the message and shuts up. “So-called because back in Dansey House—which is currently a hole in the ground, thanks to the public-private partnership that’s years behind schedule on the refurbishment—the floor the executive offices were on had plush carpet and mahogany-paneled walls. Very old-school, high-end civil service.”

This is actually only about 25 percent falsehood: Mahogany Row (the office floor)
did
have tropical hardwood paneling, and if the bastards from Ove Arup or Foster Associates or Wimpey or whoever have vandalized it some of us will be very annoyed. But describing Mahogany Row (the people) as “management” is a bit like calling a B-52 bomber an “air freight delivery vehicle.” They manage problems, yes. The rest of the organization exists to support them, certainly. But the
way
they manage problems resembles normal management practice the way a B-52’s cargo of free-fall thousand-pound bombs resembles a Post Office sorting room.

Pete points a questioning index finger at the ceiling and makes a circling motion while raising an eyebrow.

“What?” asks Andy.

“You make it sound like the House of Bishops. Somewhat political and hands-off.”

“They are, usually,” I explain. If they weren’t, there’d be glowing craters all over the landscape. “But in this case it really looks like a case of hands-on management, with some deliberate meddling.”

“This Mary—”

“Mhari.”

“Mhari. What’s wrong with her? Apart from . . .”

I shrug. “Apart from her being my long-ago psycho ex? She’s one of
them
, Pete. A PHANG, a Person of Hemophagic Autocombusting Nocturnal Glamour, or whatever the fuck the politically correct acronym stands for this morning. She’s a stakeholder in the whole process and she’s been given
carte blanche
to control the outcome of a committee process tasked with defining policy for Human Resources with specific reference to Workplace Health and Safety, employee special needs subject to the Equalities Act (2010), and other relevant legislation. What DRESDEN RICE comes up with has the potential to be set in stone—”

“Stop!” I stop, startled by Pete’s interruption. He raises a hand. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with that? Because what I’m hearing is, if you had an equivalent committee looking into the needs of, say, an Orthodox Jew or a paraplegic in a wheelchair, you’d object to the group in question being represented on the committee—”

Andy shakes his head, for which I’m profoundly grateful, because I seem to have stepped on a landmine in the fraught field of discrimination awareness, and it’s only a matter of time before someone unmasks me as a running dog of the oligoheteropatriarchy. (Which I will cop to, but it’s a hell of a handicap to play under when you’re participating in a game of privilege bingo.) “There’s a fundamental difference between a vampire and a regular human minority, Pete: normal people don’t have super-strength, mind control powers, and a thirst for blood.”

“Also,” I add, “the committee seems to have been weighted from the outset with the aforementioned WOMBATs. Whose defining characteristic seems to be that
they don’t believe in vampires
. So someone upstairs put a vampire with rad mind control skillz in charge of a ship of fools who are blind to the problem this presents. Like, oh, the whole new variant K syndrome thing that led me to them in the first place.”

“New variant
what
?”

“K syndrome; it’s a kind of dementia that ritual magicians are prone to,” Andy explains. “What Bob found was a new one, let’s call it
V
syndrome. It doesn’t affect the PHANGs themselves: it affects their victims. Looks a lot like Kuru or Mad Cow Disease, only it kills within weeks.”