The Rhesus Chart (4 page)

Angleton cleared his throat right behind me and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Well, boy?” he asked as I spun round. He was holding a small black binder, open at a page of peel-off stickers. Three of the five circular symbols had been removed, leaving shiny grease paper backing. I tried to look at the remaining ones but they gave me a stabbing pain behind my right eye.

“The thing on the other side of the door is pretty dumb,” I said. “I think I can take it out, if we open the door, but it’ll be touch-and-go. And if it’s actually inside the office, rather than on the other side of a portal with its end point in the office, it might make a mess of—”

“Leave that to me.” Angleton hefted his book of stickers. “Harrumph. What do you propose to do?” I told him. “Harrumph,” he said again, and considered the idea for a few seconds before nodding. “Yes, you do that, Bob. I’ll sign off on the forms for the replacement kit tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. Turned towards the cowering crowd of Residual Human Resources. “Here’s how we’ll do it. Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, catch a zombie by the—”

I reached out with my mind and
grabbed
. He came, shuffling, reluctantly: an older, more withered corpse, wearing the dress uniform of a funereal military policeman. The original owner of the body was long dead. What held it upright now was a feeder in the night, a weak demon with a tendency to embed itself in (and take over) the neural connectome of its victims. I think it knew that I had a fate in mind for it, and not a pleasant one, but it was bound into the body by a geas, a compact of power that required it to obey my lawful commands.
“Hear ye this,”
I said, in my halting Old Enochian:
“define new subroutine basilisk_grenade() as callback from operator(); begin; depress red button on front of payload; aim payload at self->face(); walk forward for ten paces; halt and retain physical control of payload indefinitely . . .”

I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird.

 • • • 

ABOUT THAT STICKER BOOK:

“I want you to turn off the outer ward, boy,” he told me. “Then shove your zombie inside and turn it on again. And after another fifteen seconds I want you to turn it off. Can you do that?”

I nodded. I had the beginning of a throbbing headache: the crackling gibber and howl from beyond the portal, combined with the Residual Human Resource’s whining sense of dread at its undeserved fate, was getting to me. Controlling the ward at the same time wasn’t exactly demanding but required focus—especially in case anything went wrong. “Okay,” I said.

“Good. Then do it now.”

I switched off the outer ward, and the howl rose to a near-deafening roar, a silent arctic gale buffeting at my attention.
“Thou shalt advance!”
I commanded my blue-suited minion:
“Perform the operation as soon as the portal opens!”
Then, to the all-but-deanimated relic on the door handle:
“Open the door
fucking right now
!”

I shoved the full force of my necromantic mojo into the doorman, who twitched slightly and moaned something inarticulate and inaudible. So I shoved again. I’m not sure I can describe exactly what it feels like to pump your will into an empty vessel, filling and inflating it and bringing purpose (if not life) back to lumpen dead limbs. The feeder was still there, so I wasn’t entirely doing it from cold: but it was listless and tired, as close to exhausted as I’ve ever felt. I rubbed my forehead and concentrated.
“Go!”
I shouted.

The nearly twice-dead corpse lurched to its feet. Then it twisted the door handle and pushed, opening the path for my reluctant bomb carrier.

I’m not sure what I saw through the open portal. My memory is full of confused, jumbled-up images of tentacles and lobster-claws and crazy-ass stuff looking like industrial robots made out of raw sewage and compound eyes the size of my head. I can’t really say what it was, though, because my inner ears were ringing. It was total sensory overload, backlit by shimmering curtains of light and electrical discharges and the screaming of damned telemarketers in hell. Okay, I made that last bit up. But it was
raw
.

“Close,
dammit
! Close!”
I yelled in Enochian. The door-zombie moaned incoherently and stumbled, collapsing against the portal, just as a bouquet of tentacles reached across the threshold and wrapped themselves around my bomb-carrier zombie in something that was probably not intended as a loving embrace.

My bomb carrier groaned piteously, with an inner voice so loud that I could feel it in my head even over the unholy din from the tentacle monster. I shuddered. I’ve never actually seen something
kill
a feeder in the night before—disembodiment is all very well, but something told me my minion wouldn’t be coming back for sloppy seconds. But he’d stepped up to the threshold, and he was carrying the basilisk gun, and he’d pushed the self-timer “start” button . . .
“Close the
fucking
door before I invent a whole new hell to banish you to!”
I screamed at the door-corpse. (I am taking a liberty here. I had, and have, no idea what the Enochian for “fuck” is. Probably because the beings who invented that language didn’t have anything remotely approximating mammalian genitalia. Even before their final extinction rendered the whole point moot.)

I shoved, hard, with my mind. So hard, in fact, that everything began to turn gray and my ears—my physical ears—began to ring.
K syndrome here I come,
I thought with a resigned sense of futility. Angleton was in front of me, approaching the edge of the outer ward, but I could tell this wasn’t going to work—

There was a soundless flash of light and a deep, resonant thud, as of a gigantic door slamming on the other side of a wall. I felt it in my gut as I stumbled. Another flicker: I couldn’t see properly—

“Cut the ward, boy, cut it
now
!” Angleton snarled over his shoulder.

The ward? Oh, right.
I fumbled with my phone and hit the “off” icon on the control app. The light show began to fade. “Hang on, have we closed the portal?” I asked.

The door to Andy’s office was still half-ajar, a skeletonized hand dangling from the doorknob. Angleton stepped around the remains of the door zombie with the delicate gait of a man in expensive shoes avoiding a dog turd. He raised a hand: dust and bones and other disquieting shapes gathered themselves up from the pile on the threshold and rolled beneath the lintel, vanishing into the darkened space beyond.

Angleton waited a few seconds, then pulled the door shut with his fingertips. Next he raised the black folder and delicately removed a decal. “By the authority vested in me,” he said, “I declare this office closed.” Then he carefully applied the sticker to the center of the door, and stepped backwards.

“Have we closed the—” I began to repeat, then stopped. “Hang on. What’s going on?” I stared at the mess of paint, charred patch of carpet, and graffiti’d patch of blank wall at the side of our office area. “Hang on,” I repeated, backing up mentally. “Wow.”

I took a step towards the wall. Angleton caught my arm. “You don’t want to get too close until it’s had time to anneal.”

“Until what’s had time?”

“The ward I placed on Mr. Newstrom’s office. Class ten,” he added, almost smugly.

“Class
ten
?” I’d heard of wards that strong: I didn’t know we actually
had
any.

“Yes, boy. By tomorrow morning nobody except you, me, and Mr. Newstrom will even remember there was an office there—and Andy will only do so because he left his coat inside.” He clapped his hands together. “I want you to prepare a report on this incident for me. But be a good chap and fetch Mr. Newstrom back inside first. I believe it has begun to rain, and as I mentioned, he doesn’t have a jacket anymore.”

 • • • 

I WENT OUTSIDE AND HAULED ANDY IN, AND THEREAFTER WE
didn’t get much work done, apart from the inevitable clean-up and sending the surviving Residual Human Resources back to their crypt. Then I made an executive decision that Andy and I needed to finish the night shift by performing a destructive bioassay on the contents of a bottle labelled “drain cleaner” I’d found in a drawer in my desk. After repeated oral analysis, we concluded it was mislabelled. It was a risky procedure—if the bottle hadn’t been mislabelled we could have made ourselves
very
ill indeed—but certain traditions must be upheld. In particular, a young high-flying officer should not tell a former superior that they’ve been bloody idiots without the plausible deniability lent by a sufficiency of single malt whisky. Even if it’s true.

“So what’s
your
ten-percenter?” Andy asked after I finished explaining precisely why he needed the refresher course on health and safety procedures when conducting summonings. “Don’t tell me you’re working on an admin-side scheme?”

“Actually, I am,” I said, hoisting a shot glass in his direction: “Prosit!”

“Up yours.” He took a sensible sip. “No, seriously, they’ve got you on the hook, too, haven’t they? That’s why you came in to work late?”

Actually they didn’t. The ten-percenter thing only really applied to staff with actual postgraduate degrees. I’d never finished my PhD, much less got to strut my stuff in a silly robe, but I’d jumped on the bandwagon with a carefully muted shriek of glee. I had my own entirely selfish reasons. Andy might have selected his project because he was suffering from that peculiar version of impostor syndrome to which researcher-turned-admin bodies are prone, but for my part I’d been bitten by a bug, and I needed a plausible excuse to spend 10 percent of my working hours on a scheme the suggestions box committee probably only authorized because they hadn’t understood the full implications. (
I
had. And it was fascinating. I wish I knew who’d had the idea first, so I could shake their hand . . .)

Last year, a series of unfortunate events in Colorado Springs coincided with me being promoted onto the management fast track—and earlier this year a series of even more unfortunate events derailed me from said track, dumped me on a jet-propelled skateboard, and shoved me onto the career progression equivalent of a crazy golf course played with zombies for putting irons and live hand grenades for balls. Since then I’ve been subject to matrix management by bosses in different departments with diametrically opposed priorities who still think I work under them, while trying to establish just what is expected of me by much more senior people who think I work for
them
. It’s extremely fatiguing, not least because the furrow I’m ploughing is so lonely that nobody’s actually written a skills development manual for it: the Laundry is about procedures and teamwork and protocol, not super-spies and necromancers.

“I’m on the hook to the extent that I want to be,” I confessed. “Lockhart insisted, actually. Told me I’d never get anywhere unless I ‘set a course and stuck to it,’ to use his words. And Angleton just laughed, then told me to fuck off and play with myself.”

“Angleton said—” Andy’s eyebrow twitched again.

“No, that’s me; his actual phrasing was more . . .”
Schoolmasterly
was the word I was hunting for. A long time ago, Angleton spent a decade teaching in the English public school system (the posh, private school system, that is) and it had rubbed off on him—along with the extra special version of sarcasm generations of schoolmasters have distilled for keeping on top of their fractious charges. (Even his current nom de guerre, Angleton, was chosen with irony in mind: it irritated the hell out of our American opposite numbers, because of the one-time CIA legend of the same name. Really, he ought to be code-named SMILEY or something.) “But anyway, he gave me carte blanche, and my other boss expects me to—” I waved my hands, nearly knocked over my glass, and caught it just in time. “No, that’s not right. He just expects me to keep myself busy between External Assets jobs.”

“Paper clip audits.” Andy took a sip of Laphroaig. I didn’t bother to correct his misapprehension: External Assets, which Lockhart runs, is about paper clip audits the way the FBI is about arresting thieves, i.e. not at all but it’s extremely convenient for them that most people outside the organization don’t realize that. “Sounds to me like they want to see what you can do. Hmm.” Rueful amusement tugged at the sides of his lips. “So what are you going to do?”

“I’m building a spreadsheet. One with a lot of very interesting pivot tables.” Andy peered at me with an expression of mild disbelief. “Getting clearances for the data to feed it is a bitch, and it’s anybody’s guess whether it’s going to deliver anything useful, but if you don’t ask you don’t get . . .”

“Ask for
what
?” He hunched down in his chair. He was still a little shaky from the events of a couple of hours ago, despite all the whisky. “You’ve
always
hated admin work.”

“It’s not admin; it’s data mining.” I smiled blandly. “Big data, forward threat analysis. It’s a really neat idea from the suggestions box—my hat’s off to whoever came up with it. What I’m doing is proof of concept; there’s no way I could get a budget to do it properly. But if it works, then I can present it for discussion and maybe get something rolling.”

“Threat analysis and data mining?” Andy isn’t easily impressed: he has a habitual pose of arid detachment, an expression of distant amusement as if the slings and arrows of office politics (and the tentacles and curses of sudden-death engagement) are merely flying all around for his entertainment. But I’d got his undivided attention tonight: rescuing him from sudden death did that. “What kind of threats are you hunting, and where?”

“I’m looking for outbreaks. Not sure what, or where, so I’m trying to spread the widest net that comes to hand. Anything peculiar. A rash of spontaneous human combustion in Stevenage, or rabies in Ravensthorpe; could be anything. The point is to try and build a tripwire for anomalies.”

“But the police already—” He stopped. I shook my head.