The Apocalypse Codex

13. FIMBULWINTER

PERSEPHONE HAZARD LIES FULLY CLAD ON TOP OF A MOTEL bed, with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

She does not appear to be breathing, but she is not dead. In fact, she is very much awake.

In her mind’s eye she is standing on an infinite gray plain, flat and dusty, that sweeps away towards a horizon beneath the utterly black sky above. She is wearing ritual vestments, a gown made to a pattern designed by Jeanne Robert Foster to the specifications of her magus; her hair is bound up with silver wire, and she holds a blunt-tipped knife with two notched ivory blades bound together by a band.

All this is immaterial, existing only within her imagination—but for a practitioner of ritual magic, as opposed to a technician of computational demonology, the set dressing of the Cartesian theater is a matter of great importance. Ritual magic is unpredictable, and the civil service hates it because it relies on the unaccountable exercise of power by the dismally eccentric, if not un–house trained; nor does it work as reliably as numerology or cabbalism, let alone their infinitely more potent and reliable descendants, algorithmic imprecation and computational demonology. Its practitioners also tend to die young and horribly, of Krantzberg syndrome or something worse. But to a trained adept it delivers the power to make a reality from the field of dreams and visions.

The plain she stands on—again, imaginary—is the raw material with which she works. It is also a meeting place, for minds and other things.

Persephone kneels and begins to inscribe symbols on the featureless landscape with the tip of her ritual object. Where it touches the ground it leaves a glowing trail like a line of red LEDs in the dust. She writes rapidly, in a formal dialect of Old Enochian. The featureless plain provides syntax completion and automatic indentation: as she scribes, some of the words change shape and hue subtly. (There are many (many (nested)) parentheses: ritual magic, realtime spell-casting, hasn’t been the same since John McCarthy.)

Finally she completes her—spell? theorem?—and watches as a violet border forms around it, shrinking until the words are wrapped in a fist-sized knot of metaphor. It begins to rise, pulling free of the landscape, forming a glowing sphere. “Go,” she tells it. It slowly drifts away from her face, until after a meter it stops abruptly and rebounds sideways.

Below it, the featureless ground begins to glow, forming first the yellow outline of a wall, and then an open doorway.

Thaumotaxis: the attraction of magical power. Persephone has constructed a tool that will map the energy gradients around her and sketch yellow contours across the infinite plain, building up a map. If Fimbulwinter is indeed on the way, or if Schiller is preparing a rite of power, the solar glare of the ground will show her which directions to avoid. The map, growing in her mind’s eye, will take some hours to mature. But there’s nothing like knowing the ground you’re fighting over better than your enemy…

She can’t return to the real world while the spider is spinning the first iteration of its map-web. It’s going to take quite some time. She rises to her feet and stretches; then, reluctantly, she raises one leg and pinches the blister plaster on the back of her heel between two sharp fingernails.

***Johnny. Sitrep.***

He’s lying on his back in a dark space that stinks of mildew and neglect: an underfloor space, or a tomb, perhaps. It’s bitterly cold but he’s swaddled up in a bivvy bag, like a moth in a cocoon.

***Duchess? Where are you?***

***I’m in the Other Place, working on a map. My body is secure and I’m with Howard. Sitrep.***

***They jumped me as I checked on safe house three. We’ve been tracked—***

***I know. Howard took down two of them.***

She feels Johnny’s flicker of surprise.

***Eh? Well, they sent a brick to tackle me. I showed ’em a clean pair of heels and pocketed two. Found a suitable venue and unpacked them and they lit up on me, so I nailed one with Soulsucker and KO’d the less crazy motherfucker. Then laughing boy and me had a nice long chat.***

His mood is grim.

***I told you I had a bad feeling about this?***

Persephone waits. Finally he continues.

***The cops from Pinecrest, they’re all possessed. All of them. And the hosts are, they’re…they’re like that time in Barcelona, Duchess, that hive we ran across. So I did the full smackdown take-me-to-your-leader thing and what do you know, he did. Full-on channeling. The usual all-your-souls-are-belong-to-me bullshit, at which time I terminated the interview, but. But. Their boss is close enough to dial in for a chat, know what I mean? Schiller’s almost certainly an elder of the old church, he recognized me that time in London, and he’s actually trying to set up one of the great summonings. It’s the only explanation that fits, and it does not fill me with joy and happiness. Oh, and before I forget, Patrick says to say ‘hi.’ He’s stringing for the Nazgûl who are having a spot of bother with Denver. I don’t know about you, but I reckon the shitter is about to blow up under us; I would strongly recommend wiping arse and leaving the bathroom with extreme prejudice.***

Patrick?

***What’s Patrick doing here?***

***He’s stringing for the Black Chamber, like I said. They’ve got their claws in deep—not his fault, by the way. We had a little misunderstanding over him tailing me but it’s all sorted now. He says the Nazgûl would be very grateful for any information we could give them about what the fuck is happening in Colorado because their own people can’t visit and the local affiliate offices are all compromised. Am I getting this across, Duchess? Because if not, I am really not very fucking happy about being here. This level of shit is above even your admittedly stratospheric pay grade, in my opinion—***

Persephone has heard enough.

***Agreed, and we’re leaving tomorrow. How mobile are you? What did you do with the cops?***

***I’ve got wheels. As for laughing boy, after his boss used him as a telephone there wasn’t a lot left. Nobody’s going to find them for a while.***

***Good. I want you to come round here at first light.*** She visualizes the motel’s location. ***You, Howard, and I are going to try to drive out. But it looks like Schiller’s put a cordon around us. If we can’t get out, I intend to go for the throat. I want to nail these bastards, Johnny.***

***Whoa, you’re taking it personal, Duchess?***

***You bet I am. But I’m going to be professional about it. See you first thing tomorrow morning.***

SIGNING OFF, SHE OPENS HER EYES TO SEE WHAT KIND OF web her thaumotropic spider has woven.

Beyond the threshold of her room—a yellow outline surrounding a rectangle of slate-gray emptiness—loop vast whorls and spires of sun-yellow energy. Denver itself is a valley, low and dark, but around it rise ramparts of power. A narrow cutting leads towards Colorado Springs, another valley cupped between high walls of compulsion, but near the edge of the city there rises one leg of a towering arch of light. A torrent of power roaring into the sky, coming out of nowhere and leaping out across the plain towards an answering pillar ten miles to the north. It’s so strong it’s right off the scale, a multiple reactor meltdown in the middle of the background field of ambient radiation.

Persephone stares at the arch of power for a subjective minute. Then she swears, clicks her heels together, and vanishes from the Other Place.

I’D SET MY PHONE TO WAKE ME UP AT 7 A.M., BUT I’M AWAKE and dressed and waiting for it three minutes before it sounds.

I go into the motel bathroom and splash water on my face, then shave. There are dark bags under my eyes and, not to put too fine a point on it, I look like something the cat tried to bury. I haven’t had enough sleep, and what sleep I managed to snatch came with an unpleasant freight of dreams: plateau, temple, sleeper, you know the drill.

There is a shitty filter coffee machine and I use it with malice in mind, dunking two whole bags of Starbucks’ oiliest caffeinated charcoal in the cone. As it hisses and burbles I try to check my email on my phone.

Nothing.

Now, there are few existential crises as unnerving for a geek like me (the original feral kind—not your commercialized cash cow as-reimagined-by-Urban-Outfitters-and-Hollywood fashion geek, who is basically a hipster with a neckbeard and worse fashion sense) as being off the net. It takes me a couple of minutes of prodding and poking to determine that the motel’s wifi network is up but has no way of sending packets to the wider internet, and AT&T’s two-wet-shoelaces-and-a-tin-can excuse for wireless broadband has also shat its routing tables and is drooling in a corner. There are a couple of laptops hooked up to the hotel wifi network—I can see their owners’ porn stashes from the shiny new Dell—so it’s not my equipment. Frowning, I check for Google. Nope, and if their private backhaul isn’t talking to the local ISPs we’re in major blackout territory. Following a hunch I punch up the maps app and see if I can get a GPS signal. Nothing, nada.

The coffee pot is making drowning-squirrel noises as I do something I never do in hotel rooms, which is to pick up the TV remote for a purpose other than hammering the “off” button. The in-house check-out channel comes up on the screen, but once I start to channel hop I rapidly confirm an unpleasant suspicion. There are too many dead spots. I can see a local news channel, a couple of community spots where amateur dramatics types are playing with their camcorders in a studio that looks like an abandoned warehouse, and of course the local porn buffet. What I don’t see is anything national: no CNN, no MSNBC, no Hitler Channel or Mythbusters. Not even Top Gear reruns on BBC America. The local cableco is clearly having a spot of bother. Mind you, I do find the God Botherer Channel, where they’re advertising a love-in at some place called the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Live coverage from two o’clock.

I stare at the screen for a minute, jaw hanging slack. Ha. Ha. Very funny. Not. They’re even giving directions for how to get there, for any locals crazy enough to drive in this weather, and a special dispensation from Lord Jeebus to say that his faithful won’t have to worry about doing four-wheel drifts into oncoming snowplows. Raymond Schiller, Impresario and Evangelist. On stage in the New Life Church this afternoon at three. Bring all the family! A first-class production is guaranteed for all.

With a sense of gathering alarm I rummage through my wallet and pull out the Coutts card. I dial the phone number on it and a robot with a nasal whine tells me it has been unable to connect my call and I should try again later.

“Shit,” I say aloud, just as there’s a double-knock on the room door.

I’m not usually prone to flashbacks but a split second later I’m flat against the wall with a stolen revolver clenched uncomfortably in my left hand, heart rattling the bars of my tonsils and screaming to be let out. It takes a second for me to realize that cops wouldn’t knock—they’d break the door down—and it doesn’t feel like MIBs.

Feel? I wonder what’s up with me. Another funny turn?

There’s another knock, quiet and rapid. I slide over, glance through the peephole, and open the door.

“Wotcher, cock,” says Johnny, oozing into the room like a diffident landslide. Persephone is waiting behind him, looking up and down the corridor. She’s positively tap-dancing with impatience. “Nice piece,” Johnny comments.

“Come in,” I say, making sure the gun’s pointing at the floor. Persephone backs inside, then turns and has the door locked and bolted in one fluid motion. “We’re blacked out. No internet, no TV, no GPS, no phone.”

“I love it when a plan comes together.” Johnny pauses for a double beat. “What, it’s not deliberate?”

“We had dialtone at five a.m.,” I tell them. “This is new.”

“Well.” Persephone looks around. “There are roadblocks on the interstates, the airports and general aviation fields are shut down, and now the phone system doesn’t work. It sounds like—”

“Enemy action,” completes Johnny. He glances at me. “You want to get out, or go in?”

“My orders say to get out, so I’m going to leave the other on the table as Plan B,” I say. Persephone is looking at me, with an expression I usually see on Mo’s face when I’ve said something particularly stupid. “What?”

“It’s going to be harder to drive out than you think. There is an open gate near Colorado Springs, and someone—I think Schiller—is using it to power a ward around half the state.” Now I get it. She’s tired and wired, simultaneously. Then I do a double take. Power a what?

“Seems to me we can try and bug out,” Johnny observes. “Might not make it, fair do’s. Or we can drop it in my mate Paddy’s lap and hope the Nazgûl can do something with it.”

“Paddy?” I ask.

“An old mate I ran into. He’s making a living as an informer for you know who. ’Course he won’t inform on us unless I ask him to.” He smiles frighteningly. “Or we can go down to see our old friend Ray Schiller and explain the facts of life to him. Pick a card, any card.”

I turn to the table and pick up the coffee jug. Decisions, decisions. There are only two cups. “Johnny, go get us a couple of mugs from Persephone’s room.”

He bristles. “Hey, you don’t—”

“Johnny, do what the nice man says,” Persephone’s tone is even. “Take my key.”

I am still pouring the second coffee as the door closes. “How far do you trust him?” I ask, turning round to offer her a mug.

“With my life,” she says, unhesitating. “Only—” She stops. “You noticed it, too. What?”

I take a sip of coffee and grimace. “He’s pushing options at us. And something feels wrong.”

“He had a religious upbringing: he was brought up to be an elder in the very odd church that Schiller comes from. He ran away to join the army to escape. And now it turns out”—she sniffs at her mug: her nose wrinkles—“he is probably having unpleasant flashbacks.”

“Could they have turned him?”

“Out of the question.” She shrugs dismissively. “Johnny’s loyalty is not in question.” Her eyes narrow as she looks at me. “If you think we do this only for money—”

“So you want to go in,” I say, as the door opens, “find out what he’s using to power the gate and close it. Right?”

There’s a heavy chunk as Johnny puts a mug down on the desk top. “You’ve got a map, Duchess, and Mr. Howard here has got a compass.” He’s looking at the pizza box on the desk, where the complaints department has been quiescent for some time. It rattles quietly, as if it senses doom approaching.

“Johnny,” I say briskly, trying to conceal my unease, “you implied your friend Patrick is an OPA stringer, right?”

“Yep.”

“So why aren’t the OPA crawling all over this town right now?”

“Because,” Johnny says patiently, “they can’t. Schiller’s keeping them out. Paddy lives here; he’s their only eyes and ears right now.”

“Right.” I think for a moment. “Then we need to contact him because he’s probably our only way of getting a message out right now. Schiller’s big mega-church is in Colorado Springs, and he’s starting whatever it is at three this afternoon. At least that’s what the ads on cable TV say. I think he’s moving to some kind of endgame, and opening a gate is part of it. So here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to go and find Patrick and go to ground with him.” Johnny is looking at me oddly, but I push on: “You and I”—I turn to Persephone—“are going to drive down to Palmer Lake and look around. Bet it’s some kind of major ceremony—if they’re doing what I think they’re doing—”

“They’ll need lots of warm meat. Understood.” She glances at Johnny, then nods. “They’ll be processing the flock at the mega-church. What do you want to do about it, Mr. Howard?”

I take a mouthful of the foul wake-up juice. “I think we should confirm what’s going on, then relay to Johnny, who’s going to tell Patrick to tell his handler what the epicenter is.” Johnny nods slowly but holds his counsel. “Then we’re going to go visit the church. It’d be a good idea to confirm the picture before we set the Nazgûl on them. Plus, they may be running the abattoir some distance from the buffet. In which case we may be able to rescue a few folks.” I swallow again, my throat abruptly dry. “And then I’m going to take some holiday snaps.”

I HATE KILLING.

Most people seem to have this escapist James Bond vision of secret agents offing bad guys left, right, and center, then wisecracking about it. Or they think we’re some kind of Jack Bauer psychopath torturing the truth about the ticking bomb out of everyone in sight. In truth, killing is a very unusual part of the job and it leaves me feeling sick and depressed for months afterwards—and that’s when someone else is doing it.

I can count on my thumbs the number of people I have intentionally killed in my decade-plus of service. I’ve put down a lot of once-living humans whose bodies still moved but whose nervous systems were in service to alien nightmares, but that’s not the same. The zombies, like the two who tried to grab me back in the hotel, are not so terrible—you learn to live with the inevitability of it eventually—but the very idea of killing a thinking, laughing, loving human being makes me sick in my stomach and fills me with horror. And that’s when it’s a bad guy who’s got a knife at my throat or who is pointing a gun at me, and I can justify it to myself as self-defense. (Killing innocent bystanders is something I have nightmares about. Once, for a traumatic week, I thought I’d done so; it nearly broke me.)

Anyway, that’s why they send me on these missions. As my ex-boss Andy put it, “Would you rather we gave the job to someone who enjoyed it?”

It’s bad enough when I have to do smelly stuff that lands someone else in the shit. TL;DR version is, I hate killing, and I try to find any possible shadow of an excuse to avoid doing it. (And so does my wife.)

…Which is why it feels very peculiar, not to mention distressing, to be in this position.

Schiller’s ministry is clearly messing with very dangerous powers. That Bible alone would have been enough to justify shutting him down with extreme prejudice, and as for the rest—the brain parasites, the baby farm Persephone stumbled across, not to mention the Fimbulwinter weather and the Sleeper in the Pyramid—all of those are enough to justify bringing the hammer down hard.

I don’t like the term “collateral damage”; it trivializes agony and dismemberment, mourning and grief. (You try telling the bereaved survivors that you had to kill their family and friends to protect their freedom. See how you like what they say to you.) But if any situation justifies the use of extreme force, this comes close. If Schiller’s misguided attempt to wake the Gatekeeper (Is Schiller really so naive he believes that abomination is Jesus Christ?) succeeds, everyone in the world will pay the price. These things are not demons or gods: they’re ancient intelligences from other corners of the cosmos that are normally inaccessible and inhospitable to our kind. When they get into our world they are as inclined to mercy towards us as cats are towards mice. We make splendid toys for their amusement, until we break.

If Schiller is really trying to conduct a great summoning with the Apocalypse Codex as a reference manual, someone has to shut the gate down before he levers it wide enough to summon his master—a process which probably involves mass human sacrifice, because these nitwits are generally too theory-impaired to realize that if they want to make a nuclear explosion there are more efficient ways to do it than banging two lumps of highly enriched uranium together by hand. And unless the Seventh Cavalry—that would be the Nazgûl—make it over the hill in time, that duty devolves on me. Because I’m apprenticed to the Eater of Souls (and how’s that for a job description? Junior Assistant Under-Secretary For Eating Of Souls, Fourth Grade) and they made me sign for Pinky’s pocket consumer implementation of SCORPION STARE, the original basilisk gun in a box—so I guess from the outside I look like some kind of super-powerful government assassin.

While all the time I’m brokenly repeating inside, like an old-time cracked record, fuck me, I’ve drawn the hangman’s straw. Again.

TRY LOOKING AT IT FROM SOMEONE ELSE’S POINT OF VIEW:

Persephone drives slowly into the teeth of the twilight, peering suspiciously at the road from behind wipers that sweep across the windscreen with a rhythmic thud, shoveling the driving snow into the chilly night.

The liaison officer from External Assets slumps next to her in the passenger seat. His face is turned away. He could almost be sleeping, but occasionally he raises a hand to scratch alongside his nose or delivers some other sign of sentience. The other hand rests, palm down, on the small cardboard pizza box in his lap.

The weather is unnerving. Huge snowflakes, fingernail-sized, drift from a sky that dawn has barely brightened to the color of dull slate, warmed by a brassy tint that bespeaks more snow to come. There’s little wind and the flakes drop steadily, dulling the sound of traffic from outside the coupé and reducing visibility to a couple of hundred meters.

The municipality snowplows are out and the roads are gritted. Even so, the fresh snow is filling in tire tracks in front of her eyes. Denver gets snow and people hereabouts know how to drive in the stuff, but the sidewalks and trees are already blanketed thickly, and it’s getting heavier.

There’s a ramp onto the interstate, clogged with sluggish traffic shuffling south. It moves in fits and starts. She glances sideways at Howard again. A civil service chinless wonder, Johnny thought. Well, the chinless wonder in question broke out through a snatch squad and evaded capture as neatly as any field op in the Network. And the chinless wonder seems to harbor ideas about leading from the front, not dropping the people he thinks he’s responsible for in the sticky stuff. And he’s inclined to go for the throat when confronted with a fight/flight choice. All in all, he’s shaping up extremely positively as far as Persephone’s personnel review is concerned. But…holiday snaps? He’s joking, he’s mad, or he’s holding something back. And she knows which she’d put her money on.

Persephone checks her rearview again, then squints into the falling curtain of snow. A big rig looms up out of the haze on her right, stationary on the hard shoulder. Snow is already mounding up across its hood as she rolls past it in a wave of slush, maintaining a steady forty. A lunatic in an SUV is coming up too damned fast on the left, but at least he won’t be yacking on his cellphone on the way to work. “Mr. Howard. Is your phone getting a signal yet?”

Howard’s hand moves to his coat pocket. “Nope.” He stares at the iPhone for a while before sliding it away again. “Thaumometer’s still hot ahead of us, though.”

Persephone compares his announcement to her mental map, lurid gold and yellow highlights gleaming like Midas’s curse, and finds that the spike of power that marks the portal is right where he said. “Check.”

She scans her rearview again. “About the target. Once Patrick notifies the Black Chamber, what do you think we should do?”

Her passenger cogitates for a few seconds. “That depends. If the Nazgûl tell us they’ll handle it—then, I think, at that point we should leave as fast as we can. Assuming we’re able to, of course. At that point, it’s their baby.”

“And if they don’t? Or if we can’t contact them?”

Howard sighs. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get—”

There are red-and-blue lights flashing up ahead. Another big rig has slid off the side of the road, and the highway patrol are directing traffic over to the left to pass it. She notices the way Howard tenses. “Do you have a plan, or were you going to improvise?” she asks.

“It depends on whether Schiller’s church event is where he’s opening the gate, or merely where he’s feeding it from,” he admits.

“They’re separate.” She purses her lips. Can’t he see that? Doesn’t he have the inner eye to observe the magic lighting up the horizon all around? Clearly not—and she doesn’t think he’s the type to go through life with eyes wide shut.

“Then it also depends on whether the Nazgûl are on the case. I figure I can shut down one or the other but not necessarily both, assuming they’re in separate places. If the Nazgûl can shut down the gate I can stop the sacrifices, or vice versa. Or—”

“You are not asking me to take one of them. Why is that?”

She keeps her eyes on the road ahead, but her fingers tighten on the wheel. Howard might notice and think she’s tense because of the snow, but he’d be wrong. Clearly Lockhart didn’t brief him fully: it’s almost as if he thinks he’s in charge here.

Howard is silent for a few seconds. Then: “I don’t think it’s fair to ask civilian contractors to do something that could get them killed in the line of duty.”

Civilian Contractors? Lockhart definitely left him in the dark, then, or maybe that part of her dossier was above Howard’s clearance level. But Persephone finds another aspect of Howard’s reply more interesting than his misconceptions about her and Johnny. “What has fairness got to do with it?”

Howard looks at her. She keeps her eyes on the road, but can half-feel his curiosity burning into the side of her face. “We hired you for a hands-off reconnaissance mission, not a suicide op. As of the moment Lockhart told me the operation was scrubbed, you were off the hook. You’re not part of the Laundry. You don’t want to be part of the organization. So you’ve done your bit; game’s over, you can go home and collect your pay packet with a clear conscience and a job well…okay, a job that would have been well done if the snark wasn’t a boojum after all.” He clears his throat. “I, on the other hand, swore a binding oath to defend the realm against certain threats, of which this is clearly one. Schiller made it my business when he stuck his nose into our tent back in London. Now, my job doesn’t stop until it’s over. If I was a complete bastard like some of my managers, I’d be looking for a way to blackmail you into giving your all for Blighty. But I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience. So once we’ve confirmed the target and gotten the word out, I want you to—”

Persephone can’t contain her laughter anymore: she starts to giggle. “Oh dear. Is that what you think?”

“Uh?”

“You listen to me. I am not going to leave this job half-done, and I am certain Johnny will say exactly the same when you ask him. You are not the only person here with a reason to put Schiller out of business.”

Howard hunkers down in his chair. “Oh,” he says quietly. “Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.”

“Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”

They drive on in silence for another ten minutes before Persephone feels calm enough to try to explain.

“The Laundry, Mr. Howard. It’s not noted for enabling high achievers, is it?”

“What?” He looks puzzled. “What, you mean—”

“It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.” She pauses to maneuver around a nose-to-tail queue of trucks that are making bad time on an uphill stretch, slowing as she sees red-and-blue lights on the shoulder ahead. “Wizards and visionaries are all very good but you cannot count on them for legwork and form-filling. Which is why there is tail-chasing and make-work and so many committee meetings and reports to read and checklists to fill out, to keep the low achievers preoccupied.

“Now, I suspect Gerald Lockhart didn’t brief you on certain…aspects of his department. Like its relationship with what is sometimes jokingly called Mahogany Row. And it’s not my place to brief you for him, but you appear to be working on the assumption that the tail wags the dog, not vice versa. So let me put it to you that there’s more to the occult intelligence world than institutional bureaucracy. Sometimes a bureaucracy grinds up against a problem that requires a mad genius instead of an office full of patient researchers. And indeed, the mad genii predate the bureaucracy. The Laundry is like an oyster nursing an irritating grain of sand within layers of bureaucratic mother-of-pearl.”

The snow is falling in ever-heavier sheets, obscuring the roadside signage and turning the slopes to either side of the freeway into blank white planes. “Sometimes they try to nurture the talent within the organization. You usually work for Dr. Angleton, don’t you? Yes, I suspect you’re one of them. The specialists who come up through the ranks. And then there are the external assets. Lockhart deals with those. Because sometimes the bureaucracy needs people who can do things that bureaucrats are not allowed to do, people who can work outside the law or who have unique skills. The organization needs to scratch its own back.”

She thumps the steering wheel hub hard. Howard jerks upright. “What?”

“I am not outside your agency, Mr. Howard, I am outside your organization chart. And I’m outside it because I am more useful on the outside. Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone. If I was embedded within the organization I would spend most of my time in committee meetings, writing reports, and arguing with imbeciles. I would be far less efficient under such constraints, and I am not a patient woman.”

The idiots in Rome, endlessly bickering over who had killed her parents, had tried her patience sorely. And the patronizing men at the Ministry with their no job for a little girl. The British organization, at least, had a more pragmatic approach—one reflecting its antique collegiate origins, all the way back to Sir Francis Walsingham and John Dee; never mind its wartime expansion into a special operations team, willing to take anyone whether or not they had been to the right school or university. Buried somewhere in the lard-belly of committee agendas and office politics is a steel spine, and the arrangement they offered her has proven to be very satisfactory.

“The Laundry is stranger and older than you probably realize,” she says quietly. “And the core, the informal group the bureaucrats call Mahogany Row, goes back even further. For hundreds of years they existed, a select band of practitioners of the dark sciences, solitary by nature, funded out of the House of Lords’ black budget.” Howard’s jaw flaps, silently; it’s always amusing to watch their reaction when they learn the truth. “Mahogany Row, the bureaucrats call it. They don’t know the half of it. The larger organization, built from the guts of SOE, was created purely to support the wizards of the invisible college; these days, the civil servants think they’re the real thing. But only because the occupants of those empty offices choose not to disabuse them of such a useful misconception.

“I believe Gerald Lockhart may have misled you about our working relationship, Mr. Howard. Perhaps he implied that Johnny and I are contractors who work for the agency. A little white lie that lends us a bit more flexibility than we’d have if we spent all our hours filling in time sheets and attending meetings. That sort of stuff is Gerald’s job—dealing with the bureaucracy so that we don’t have to. Us? We go places, break plots, and kill demons.”

She closes her eyes briefly to consult her memory map, opens them again as a stupid minivan driver blazes past, spraying turbid slush everywhere. There are more flashing lights. The big USAF base is some miles ahead, off to the right, behind a chain-link fence surrounding the area of a medium-large European state.

“Forty to fifty minutes,” she says, pressing down on the accelerator. The yellow glare of the gate lies off to one side and astern, just beyond the horizon, lighting up the starless sky of the Other Place. An echoing glare of light lies dead ahead, straight down the highway. “Then we can shut down Schiller’s revival service.”

She glances sideways to check his reaction to her words. Howard is staring intently at the pizza box on his lap instead of listening.

“What is it?” she asks.

Howard looks up. “I think they’re onto us,” he says.

MORNING AT THE NEW LIFE CHURCH.

The New Life Church isn’t just a church—it’s a campus and office complex, with multiple buildings housing the World Prayer Center and a whole slew of small group ministries focussing on specialized niches.

Its worshipers are, in Raymond Schiller’s eschatology, misguided at best and damned at worst; or they were, until he convinced the Board of Overseers to give him a fair hearing at a prayer retreat in the compound near Palmer Lake. The Board of Overseers have now been Saved, and are duly grateful. As a sign of appreciation they have agreed to make the main sanctuary available for Ray’s big tent event, in a joyous celebration of the Golden Promise Ministries’ bounteous commitment to the people of Colorado Springs. In fact, they’re pulling out all the stops to bring their flock to the true cause—they’ve rearranged the main sanctuary for a largely standing congregation and, with the Sheriff’s Department providing volunteer fire marshals and a waiver, they’ve got a roof to cover 8,000 souls. New Life only has about 9,000 regulars at present and barely a third are likely to show for a non-Sunday special organized by a different local church, but Golden Promise have been love-bombing Colorado Springs and environs with advertisements for the event for the past week; and once they’re Saved, the new converts will be most zealous in their attempts to bring friends and family along.

Kick-off is due at 2 p.m., for an event that is planned to run all afternoon. It’s a tight schedule. The Golden Promise team are supposed to complete their tear-down by 9 p.m. so that the sanctuary can be returned to order for the Sunday morning service. The reality, as Ray has explained to Pastors Dawes and Holt, is that Sunday is cancelled. Every day is Sunday in the world to come, and once the New Life Church is rededicated to a higher purpose it will process new blood around the clock.

It’s morning at the New Life, although Ray couldn’t be certain if his watch didn’t tell him so. “Who ordered this?” He frets at sister Roseanne: “Our Lord sends his storms to protect the flock of the faithful until it’s time to take what is ours of right, but if it stops them coming to Church…”

“I’m sure it will be all right, Father?” She clutches his day planner apprehensively. “The Lord will provide snowplows and road salt, I’m sure!”

Ray glances at her sharply, but there’s no sign of irony in her hopeful face. Irony is a sin, but his handmaids are faithful followers, pure and chaste even without a host to guide them. He nods slowly. “I’m certain He will.” He turns his head to his security chief. “Alex. Our expected drop-in guests. You’re ready for them?”

Alex nods. “We have security in plain clothes checking the doors, and the parking garage barrier is manned. I’ve issued mug shots and everyone’s been briefed on the troublemakers; the control room’s manned and watching for them.” He cracks his knuckles. “They won’t get past us.”

Ray closes his eyes. “They are approximately twenty miles north of here, coming south along the Ronald Reagan Expressway. Slowly, because of the weather. The Holy Spirit told me so.” He opens his eyes. “Now, what of the other task?”

“It’s being taken care of. I sent some missionaries.” Alex has a habit of becoming uncharacteristically terse when he is discussing something that he thinks Schiller is best insulated from, lest he end up on a witness stand someday.

Ray nods, thoughtfully. “I’ll be in the vestry. Bring them to me as soon as you have them, unless I’m on stage; in that case, hold them until I’m ready.” He stands and rests a hand on sister Roseanne’s shoulder for a moment—his sense of balance has been erratic this past day or so. “God be with you.”

PATRICK IS IN THE KITCHEN, BREWING UP A POT OF TEA, WHEN he realizes something is very wrong.

Moira is upstairs in the bedroom, tucked up and crashed out on a cocktail of temazepam and Imodium to keep her guts under control. The chemo this time round is visibly eroding her, like a too-fast river wearing down a sandstone bed. It cuts into her earlier with each course. She won’t be stirring much before noon, but he needs to get moving and buy food, then call the shop about her car. So he’s up and about in a pair of worn bedroom slippers and a dressing gown that’s seen better days, sluicing hot water around the teapot and getting ready to spoon loose leaf tea into it. The Irish Breakfast blend brings back memories, not all of them bad.

It’s unnaturally dark outside, and the weatherman’s got no clue about what’s happening: there’s something on the news about an extreme weather event and a blackout that’s hit the phone company—backhoe through a cable, probably, or a fire in an exchange. But Patrick pays scant attention to the radio. Something is tickling his nerves.

He can’t say precisely what it is, but his hackles rise. Then, a moment later, he feels it. It’s a tight, warm sensation at the base of his throat, in the other tattoo they applied when he signed the contract. A warning and a threat. He glances around, taking stock. The kettle is on the burner, heating up. There’s nothing visible in the backyard. Danger. He’s felt it before, this premonition of disaster. It takes him back to an evening in Belfast: taking a shortcut home from the pub via Barrack Street, just off the lower Falls, when he’d realized he was being stalked. Or another time in Marseilles, setting up a fallback route for the Duchess when the same faces kept showing up in shop window reflections behind him. The fetid breath of disaster panting after him.

There is a reproduction grandmother clock in the front hall, patiently ticking away the seconds. Patrick darts through and opens the cabinet door on its front, pushes aside the lead counterweights and disturbs the pendulum that has counted out the twilight hours and months he’s spent here with Moira. Leaning inside the cabinet with its muzzle on the floor and the butt close to hand is a sawn-off pump-action shotgun. Five in the tube and one up the spout. He keeps it for emergencies, along with the discreet camera on the front stoop and the screen inside the door. Right now the camera is showing nothing much, just the usual view of the steps and the mailbox, but something about it isn’t quite right—

There is a hammering on the door. “Police! Open up!” There’s nothing on screen, but right then the tattoo heats up like a bad patch of sunburn and begins to glow.

Out of time for the subtle stuff, Patrick feels an old and familiar fury: So they want to fuck with me and mine? Not that he’s got much. This run-down two-story house in the suburbs, and his run-down wife, sallow-skinned and exhausted from the cancer, sleeping upstairs. But he will not let them pass, whoever they are. He pulls the shotgun, brings it round to bear on the front door, and fires without hesitation.

Click. Nothing happens.

Crunch. The door bows inward near the lock, but the reinforced frame he installed is holding for now—until they bring a jack to bear.

Patrick swears angrily and works the slide, ejects a cartridge, and pulls again. Click.

His tattoo is burning hot now. The kettle begins to wind up to an eerie banshee scream from the kitchen as it comes to a rolling boil.

Another cartridge goes rolling across the floor as Patrick squeezes the trigger again: another misfire. He glances down as he reloads, futile—the red plastic tubes projecting from the cartridge bases are glowing cuprous green in the shadows. They’re loaded with banishment rounds, but it looks like someone’s brought countermeasures.

Patrick drops the gun and legs it towards the kitchen, hunting wildly for anything suitable—the knife rack by the worktop, the kettle screeching its iron lung out—grabs Moira’s favorite carving knife and the aforementioned iron jug, skids back into the hall, and turns at bay as the door opens.

They are not the police.

“Motherfucker!” Patrick screams in fury and throws the contents of the boiling kettle at the first intruder. Conservatively attired in a black suit and tie, white shirt, the missionary takes the steaming gush direct in the face without flinching. His eyes glow the same shade of green as the flawed shotgun cartridges rolling underfoot as he steps forward. Glowing green wormlike shapes writhe within the intruder’s eyes. “Get the fuck out!”

Patrick lunges forward, carving knife held low. The missionary is spreading his arms wide. Now his mouth opens, revealing something silvery and twitching. The knife is a faint hope. Patrick leans hard and the point sinks into the missionary’s chest, right between the ribs, but no blood comes out. And now Patrick’s tattoos are glowing nearly as brightly as the low-power bulb in the hall light fitting. The missionary takes another step forward, and the second one crosses the threshold, cutting off any chance of escape through the front door.

Patrick takes a step back, treads on a loose shotgun cartridge, and falls against the wall beside the clock. Door hanging open, chains and counterweights disemboweled—he reaches in and yanks hard on the pendulum, a kilogram of brass on the end of a meter-long steel shank. (The clock was his old man’s; the only thing of his that he’s bought to the new world.) Raising the improvised shillelagh he takes a swipe at the missionary’s head with the counterweight. Success. The thing in front of him raises an arm to block, and stops pushing forward. The knife blade sticking out of his chest is oozing slowly, thick and dark.

“Join us,” drones the missionary. “We are the Saved. Join us and bathe in the blood of the lamb and be Saved forever.”

“Fuck off,” Patrick snarls, waving the pendulum at the walking corpse. “Get aff my fuckin’ patch, motherfocker!”

“Join us—” The missionary repeats the invitation perfectly, like an answering machine from hell.

“Patrick”—another voice from the top of the stairs, one that detonates an emotional hand grenade that sends grief-tainted shrapnel tearing through his heart—“what’s going on?”

Only one thing left. Utter desperation and fear threaten to weaken his knees before he can do it. It’s a last resort: maybe they can—

***Help?***

Patrick loses consciousness immediately. Someone else looks out through his eyes, someone more detached, with the aloof cruelty of a small boy contemplating the antics of insects trapped in a jam jar.

“Hello,” says Patrick’s mouth.

The missionaries hold their ground, but look apprehensive. It’s like they know their own kind.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” says Control. “Did Ray send you?”

“Join us—”

“Bo-ring.” Patrick’s body jabs the pendulum into the nearer missionary’s face and lets go of it. And then, with an agility alien to a sixty-year-old in poor condition, he stoops sideways and scoops up the shotgun.

“Patrick? Who are these—”

“Oh shut up.” He spins towards the staircase and casually pulls the trigger. The detonation is deafening in the confined space. What’s left of Moira’s upper torso fountains blood as it topples forward, coming to rest at the foot of the stairs. Her head lands face down on the landing.

Control ejects the spent cartridge, chambers a fresh round, and turns back to face the missionaries, raising the shotgun and bringing the barrel to rest under his borrowed body’s chin.

“Who sent you?” Control demands, resting a finger lightly on the trigger.

“Why did you kill her? She was Unsaved.” The second missionary is more talkative than his taller companion, whose unfortunate encounter with a carving knife has damaged his lungs.

“Who sent you?” Control repeats. “I’m getting impatient here. Tell me or I’ll kill the hostage. Then you won’t get to eat him.”

“We do not eat them!” protests the second missionary. His voice is thick and hard to make out. His tongue ripples fatly between his lips, silvery with twitching legs: it has grown almost too large for this mouth. Soon it will asphyxiate the carrier, and the host will require another body. “We bring them to the Lord.”

“All right.” Control lowers the shotgun muzzle far enough for Patrick’s mouth to swallow convulsively: certain physiological reflexes continue, even if the usual tenant is elsewhere. “Who is your Lord?”

“We serve the Gatekeeper of Heaven, He Who Sleeps and Will Rise Again. Come with us. Accept the love of Jesus Christ into your heart and mouth and rejoice in everlasting light for eternity. You, too, can be Saved. Help us tear down the Wall of Pain and open the gates of the pyramid and dance wild and free forever in the silver heat of His gaze!”

Control sneers. “I don’t think so!” Then he pushes down on the trigger, and the top of Patrick’s skull disappears in a mist of fatty tissue and bone splinters.

IT IS A SMALL MERCY, IN CONTROL’S OPINION: A REWARD FOR all Patrick has done for the Agency, and a final discharge that painlessly clears all debts. (Which are not inconsiderable, counting the group health insurance.) The situation was already non-survivable by the time Patrick became aware of it. He should have grasped this as soon as he realized the CCTV was being spoofed. Or in any event once the banishment rounds misfired when he engaged the enemy.

But Control is now aware of the true identity of the adversary. And that means there’s still some hope of saving Denver.

THE TROUBLE WITH GODHEADS, IN JOHNNY’S EXPERIENCE, IS that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. It seems as obvious as gravity to them, as normal as water flowing downhill and rain following sunshine; everything works the way it says in the book because the book is the inerrant word of God.

Leaving aside the idolatry implicit in taking a mere book as a more authoritative source of truth than divine revelation, there are damaging consequences when such a belief system collides with reality. If the world was created in six days six-thousand-odd years ago, then a whole bunch of evidence relating to geology, biology, paleontology, genetics, and evolution has to be ignored—or, much harder, refuted. Which is easy enough if you don’t hold with school-book larnin’, but it’s difficult to practice general medicine if your religion says bacteria can’t evolve antibiotic resistance, and hard to be a geologist if your cosmology is incompatible with continental drift.

And then there’s the picking and choosing. Men who lie with men are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But then, so is the eating of shellfish, if you go back to the original text. And the wearing of garments made from different types of fiber. And tattooing. And witchcraft—or is it poisoning? Different translations disagree. (And what on earth does the bit about what to do if your house contracts leprosy mean?) The early Church fathers cut through the Gordian knot by declaring the Old Testament obsolete: version 1.0, superseded by the new, improved version 2.0. But they couldn’t make it stick, hence the thousand-page prologue you have to wade through before you get to read the Gospel of Matthew. And even there, even in the prologue, even after weeding out the obvious Bible fanfic, there’s no rhyme nor reason: some churches can’t be arsed with the Book of Judith, while some of them cancelled the Maccabees after season two because of dwindling Nielsen ratings.

So you end up with divergent sects reading from subtly different versions of the same book—which in turn is a third-generation translation of something which might have been the original codification of an oral tradition—and all convinced that their interpretation overrides such minor obstacles as observable reality.

Which still wouldn’t be a problem except that some of the readers think the books are an instruction manual rather than a set of educational parables, a blueprint instead of a metaphor.

Johnny whistles tunelessly between his teeth as he drives.

He’s fed up to his back teeth with Godheads. Godheads in the person of his father and uncles and mother and aunts were why he joined up with the British Army when he was sixteen. Godheads following the blueprint for salvation got him into trouble a couple of years later—and then there was the Légion étrangère. Because when you’re born eldest son to the moderator of a remarkably exclusive brethren in an exceptionally free kirk where they don’t believe in sex because it might lead to dancing (which in turn would imply the existence of music), the tendency to see demons everywhere never really leaves you.

It took meeting Persephone all those years ago to show Johnny that he was not, in fact, insane: the visions and nightmares in the corners of his vision were, in fact, really there, and that his ranting elders with their taste for spiritual warfare and their ancestral skeletons in a very watery closet were barking up the wrong tree.

Johnny drives.

There is a pricking in his fingertips and an itching in his left buttock that tells him where to point the pickup. Patrick didn’t exactly hand him a business card, but they’ve broken bread and shared a meal: the symbolism is not wasted. Johnny doesn’t have much in the way of natural magical aptitude, though like Persephone he has vastly more than most of the arid theory-driven paper-pushers of the Laundry. What he does have is a knack for seeing and sensing the unseen and unfelt. Centuries earlier he’d have been doomed to the madness of the witch-finder, but in these enlightened years he’s just a regular guy with a talent for spotting trouble before it spots him. And a couple of psychotic blades.

But he has a bad feeling about Patrick.

His itches and hunches take him off the freeway and onto a leisurely cruise around the back streets of Denver. They’re drawing him north, into a subdivision dominated by low houses behind rusting chain-link fences, untidy yards showing the detritus of suburbia—dirty plastic slides and paddling pools, aging cars. Patrick and (What was her name? Morag? Moira?) live cheaply and frugally, in one of these houses. Yes, this street, that house—with the black Suburban with blacked-out windows parked casually asprawl the sidewalk fronting it.

Oh. Too late.

Johnny pulls over and backs up until his tailgate is up against the radiator of the big SUV. Then he climbs out and walks up the garden path to the front porch and the door, drawing the pair of knives as he goes and holding them point-down. The door is ajar and there is an itching in his nose, and the skin on the nape of his neck wants to stand on end. A powerful geas surrounds the house, making eyes drift by and ears misinterpret noises. Johnny, however, is immune to such distractions. He kicks the door open and breathes in the stink of death.

He counts two corpses and two bodies that still breathe. Heads turn to look at him, eyes glowing the green of luminous watch dials in the shadows. He raises his knives and they shrink backwards. Two bodies: one male, pretty much headless, a sawn-off shotgun lying to one side. Another…too late.

“Awright,” he snarls, “so whose smart idea was this?”

One of the breathing bodies—clad in a dark suit, with a spreading stain of sticky blood drenching the front of its white shirt around the handle of a carving knife—slobbers incoherently at him. The other is less far gone. In fact, by born-again zombie standards he’s positively eloquent: “The sinner summoned up a demon from hell, which shot his wife before turning his weapon on himself. You are Johnny McTavish. We have a message for you.”

“You do, do you?” Johnny stares at the speaker. He looks human—as human as a missionary in his Sunday best—but his voice sounds sluggish and thick. “Stick yer tongue out, mate.”

The missionary stares at him. Writhing shadows in the shape of worms twirl endlessly in the depths of the missionary’s eyes. Then it slowly opens its mouth, revealing a laminated silver carapace. Johnny stares at it. After a moment, it extends eye stalks and stares right back.

“I should kill you right now. Like the others.”

The missionary retracts what passes for its tongue. “Then you would not find it so easy to reach your destination.”

The other missionary’s slobbering quiets. It’s nearly out of blood; even a cymothoan mind parasite can’t get much mileage out of a body that’s no longer capable of supporting aerobic respiration.

“What destination?” Johnny keeps his knife aimed at the thing’s throat. He can feel the knife quivering, eager to carry out its task. He actually has to hold it back, to prevent it from flying out of his hand. It’s difficult to hold back, not least because of the black nucleus of rage burning at the back of his mind over what they have done here to Patrick, who was, if not an old friend, then at least a sometime brother in arms.

The surviving missionary isn’t wasting energy animating its facial muscles: the hosts do not have much use for human body language. It is as unconcerned as a corpse. “We are instructed to bring you to the High Priest, if that is your wish.”

Johnny can’t help himself: he laughs incredulously. “You what?”

“Our master ordered us to serve his High Priest. The High Priest desires your presence at the service of dedication of the masses. You should come with us.” The dying missionary twitches slightly. “You must come with me.”

“You have got to be kidding.” Well, it’s one way in, Johnny thinks. And with Patrick gone, he has no way of contacting the Black Chamber: that part of this errand is a failure. If Schiller wants to see him, that’s awfully convenient. “You aren’t going to convert me and you’re not going to plant one of those things on me. If you try, I’ll kill you. Understand?”

“Come with me,” says the walking corpse. “Please, elder. Your brother commands it.”

Johnny hesitates for a moment, but curiosity finally makes up his mind for him. “All right. But you’re driving,” he says.