The Apocalypse Codex

6. JET LAG

FORTY KILOMETERS AWAY, DANGEROUS MEN ARE STALKING A woman.

It’s a sunny day in Surrey, out beyond the M25 motorway, and the horizon-spanning urban sprawl has given way to ribbon development and scattered commuter dormitory towns separated by farms and green belt land and isolated strips of woodland. Many of these are privately owned; and the owner of one particular eighty-hectare chunk of ancient forest is in the habit of renting it out to murderers by the hour.

The woman is clearly aware that she’s being pursued. Equally clearly, she isn’t prepared for this. She’s dressed for the office, not for a hike in the wild woods, and it’s a hot day. She’s slung her black suit jacket through her handbag’s straps and is walking barefoot through the undergrowth, smart shoes clutched in one hand. Breathing deeply, she backs up close to a three-hundred-year-old oak encrusted with ivy and lichen. Her eyes flicker from side to side, mistrusting. They searched her bag and took her phone—otherwise she could get a GPS fix and call for help. She’s unarmed; she has no idea how many men are pursuing her, but doubts there are fewer than two. And they will be armed. On the other hand, she knows there’s a perimeter wall. On the other side of it, there’s a main road—if she can get over it, she can flag down a ride. Or she can backtrack along it to the gatehouse, assuming her pursuers aren’t waiting for her there. If. If. She glances up at the sky, but the foliage is so thick she can’t spot the sun. She’s running out of options, and as she realizes this her heart beats faster.

Less than a hundred meters away, her closest pursuer crouches on top of a muddy bluff and inspects the ground at his feet. Unlike his target, he’s dressed for the occasion in woodland camo and para boots. He wears a webbing vest and a helmet with headset, and carries a chunky machine pistol. Right now he’s examining a couple of telltale smears in the mud. Not boots. Not animal paw-prints, either; the only large animals he’s likely to meet in this over-tame forest are deer, and possibly the odd fox or badger. He taps his mike. “Found a trail,” he says. “Recent. Looks to be barefoot.” She came up here for a look-around, slipped and fell, he considers. Or did she? There’s no crushed patch of shrubbery nearby. He peers over the edge of the bluff, looks down three meters. If she’d gone over, I’d have heard. Probably.

Hunting around, he spots a clump of nettles. The ground around them—someone or something has given them a wide berth and, in doing so, they’ve left traces: bent stems, broken twigs. He grimaces. Clueless. It’s not what he’d expect of a smart fugitive. But nevertheless, it’s a trail. He follows it, scanning for more signs of passage. Careless, he thinks.

It’s nearly the last thing he thinks. The trail winds close to the edge of the bluff again, then through a disturbed tangle of ferns and nettles between beech trees. As he steps close to it, something catches his eye and he drops into a crouch. It’s almost invisible when he’s standing, but from beneath…“Nasty,” he whispers. Stretching between the trees, about one and a half meters up, is a nearly invisible nylon wire, smeared with mud and vegetable sap. He taps his mike again. “Rabbit showing its teeth.” He tightens his grip on his gun and swings round. Which is why the woman’s field-expedient blackjack—doubled-over nylon hose filled with pebbles from the bed of the stream that feeds the ferns—catches him on the side of the helmet rather than on the back of his neck.

They close and grapple and two seconds later it’s all over.

“How do you score that?” Johnny is lying with his back against one of the beech trees, the paintball gun beside him.

“The usual handicaps apply: I make it one all.” Persephone rolls over on her back. “You shot me, I cracked your skull.”

“That tripwire was most unpleasant, Duchess.” Johnny sits up and rubs his untouched throat. “Where did you conceal it?”

“Up top.” She sits up. “Hair extensions are one option; I can loop it through the roots in a continuous run. Takes ages to untangle, though. This time I just tucked it into the lining of my bag—metal detectors don’t see it, and if you do it properly even a trained X-ray tech will assume it’s just a seam.”

“Right. And the cosh—”

“Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.” She smiles enigmatically, then holds up one of her shoes. “Heels, too.” Then she sits up. “Okay, back to base then we’ll run it again. This time”—she reaches out and taps him on the shoulder with the shoe—“tag, you’re it. Let Zero know, will you?”

It’s a game they play about once a month: escape, evasion, and ambush. The object of the exercise is training—not merely for the pursued to avoid capture but to turn the tables on their pursuer, trapping or killing them. Often they run it in the wild, as on this rented paintball range—which they have to themselves for the day—and sometimes they play it on deserted industrial estates, at night. Sometimes they drag in other players to beef up the pursuit side, and sometimes they play it one-on-one. The only constant is that the game only ends when one of them is down.

They’re standing up and Johnny is calling Zero to tell him round two is on when his phone rings. He answers it. “It’s for you.” He passes it across.

“Yes?” She listens intently for a minute, nodding silently. “All right, I’ll do it. Thanks.” She hangs up, glances at Johnny. “Playtime is cancelled. Tell Zero to bring the car round; we have a date.”

“Uh-huh. Where?”

She starts walking, back the way they’ve come. “That was Lockhart. Schiller’s on his way to the airport and his pilot’s just filed a flight plan for Denver. As his Mission has a compound outside Colorado Springs, that’s probably where he’s going. Also, Lockhart’s got me a gilt-edged ticket. They run a weekend spiritual retreat for interested outsiders from time to time—with a remarkable track record of generating born-again believers. In fact, the conversion ratio is one of the things that got his attention.”

“So you’re going to go in and sniff around?” Johnny’s expression makes his reservations glaringly obvious.

“Of course. What could possibly go wrong?” She gives him a sardonic look. “Better hurry; I want to see if we can make the four p.m. shuttle to JFK.”

I’M AT HOME THAT EVENING, ENJOYING A LONG HOT BATH, WHEN my phone rings.

It’s been a trying day. From the whole suit-wearing thing to the offsite visit to HMGCC, Pinky and the amazing pyroclastic pigeon-zapper, and then the usual tiresome bullshit in the COBWEB MAZE working group, which is trying to nail down the extent of the damage caused by the BLOODY BARON committee being infiltrated by—no, let’s not dive in the acronym soup just yet. I go home early out of sheer brain-dead exhaustion, hit the Tesco Express for a ciabatta, microwave curry, and a bottle of wine, and just as soon as I get into the steaming hot bath in hope of unwinding, I hear my phone begin to call from the kitchen table downstairs.

(Do you take your phone to the bathroom? I reckon it’s one of the fundamental dividing lines of modern civilization—like whether you hang the bog roll so that it dangles in or out, or whether you eat your boiled eggs big-endian or little-endian. Anyway, I’m an old fart now—I’m over thirty—and I feel the need to actually put the bloody thing down for a few minutes a day. Even though it is a JesusPhone, and all JesusPhone users eventually wind up crouched in a dank, lightless cave, fondling it and crooning “preciousss…”)

So there is a loud slosh from behind me, and a baby tsunami rolls across the bathroom floor as I leg it for the stairs, swearing and hoping I left the kitchen window blinds down. Naturally I stumble on the third step and take the rest of the stairs with three bounces of the left buttock, rebound from the passage wall, and topple into the kitchen, reaching the phone on the table just as it goes silent. And then the front door opens.

“Bob? What are you doing?”

It’s Mo, back from the office earlier than I’d expected, clutching a couple of shopping bags. Unfortunately she’s not alone: trailing behind her is Sandy—a civilian teacher, friend of hers from way back—also clutching the shopping. I make a dive for the tea towel and manage to slip on a floor tile and go arse over tit—or maybe the tit is busy making an arse of himself: by this point I’m thoroughly confused.

“I was having a bath,” I explain when I stop swearing and the pain in my head, where I whacked it on a cupboard on the way down, subsides enough to permit business as usual to resume. “Then the phone rang.” The penny drops with a loud clang. “We’re meant to be doing dinner, aren’t we?” With Pete and Sandy, old friends of Mo’s who go way back. Pete’s a witch doctor—sorry, a priest of some sort—and Sandy is a high school religious education teacher with a sideline in pottery. Nice enough folks as long as you keep the conversation away from work.

“I’ll just be in the living room,” Sandy says helpfully, and disappears, leaving her smile hanging in the air like the Cheshire cat. (I’d say “smirk” but I have it on good authority that women do not “smirk.” At least, that’s Mo’s story, and she’s sticking to it.)

I manage to catch my balance just in time to help Mo deposit the shopping bags on the table. “Let’s have a look at that,” she says, then inspects the back of my head for a few seconds. “Hmm, everything seems to be intact, but you’re sprouting a lovely egg.” She kisses it, making me wince at the sudden pain. “Why don’t you go upstairs and finish that bath, then join us when you’re human?”

“My thoughts exactly,” I agree fervently, then retreat towards the stairs, dignity in tatters.

Half an hour later I make my way downstairs, drier, cleaner, and fully clothed. Mo and Sandy are bickering good-naturedly over the makings of an M&S meal, so I make myself useful and lay the table. Partway through, the doorbell rings; I answer the door, carving knife in hand (you can never be too careful) and find Pete on the doorstep, clutching a couple of bottles of wine. “Come in,” I say, and drag him through to the kitchen. For the next couple of hours Mo and I have the opportunity to lose ourselves in the clichéd middle-class role-play of hosting an informal dinner party—just as long as we remember our employment cover stories: Mo teaches history of music at Birkbeck (about a quarter true) and I’m a civil servant working in IT support (also about a quarter true these days).

The first course is leek and potato soup a la Marks and Spencer, accompanied by a rather acceptable New Zealand sauvignon blanc while the filet of trout is steaming in its own juices in the oven and Sandy unburdens herself of some workaday frustrations. Teaching is changing again, or something of that ilk—which in turn means more work for teachers, juggling lesson plans and learning new jargon. “Policy-making in RE tends to be very hands-off,” she explains; “it’s political poison, so they usually leave it alone.” Religious education in schools may be the law of the land, but aside from de-programming successive generations through boredom it’s turned into as much of a political third rail as public transport policy: whatever you do will be wrong for someone.

“Take class Ten B. I’ve got three Hindus, four Muslims, six Catholics, one Jew, two random pagans, and a Jedi. That’s going by what their parents tell us, on top of the default Church of England types who wouldn’t know a chasuble if one bit them on the pulpit. There are another three militant evangelicals and a Seventh Day Adventist who’ve been withdrawn, lest I pollute their precious ears with knowledge of rival faiths, and a couple of out-of-the-closet atheists who sit in the back row and take the piss. Now there’s this”—she’s waving her hands in counter-rotating circles—“spiritual centeredness program coming from the top down, and a whole new four-year curriculum for comparative religious education along with coursework, and my performance is evaluated on the basis of the averaged continuous assessment scores of said Jedi, pagans, and atheists…”

(Her hair’s turning gray and she’s only in her late-thirties.)

“Huh. What kind of evangelicals withdraw their kids from RE?” I ask.

Mo looks at me pityingly, but Sandy is allergic to ignorance, bless her: “Oh, you’d be surprised. Churches often behave more cultishly the smaller they get, trying to hold on to their children by making it hard to leave—and one of the easiest barriers you can put in someone’s way is to convince them that everyone else is some kind of satanic monster, doomed to hell and all too keen to take you with them. Comparative RE is pure poison to that kind of mind.”

“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.” He sips his wine thoughtfully. “But the first kind don’t put it that way. They usually think in terms of the saved and the damned, with themselves sitting pretty in the lifeboat.” He manages to simultaneously look pained and resigned. “Sometimes they find their way out of the maze. But not very often.”

“Huh. Speaking of which, I’ve been getting an earful at the office lately,” I say. Mo glances at me sharply as I continue. “One of my colleagues keeps banging on about some televangelist or other who’s been running a mission. You’d think he farts rainbows the way Jim talks about him. The, uh, Golden Promise Ministries? Do you know anything about them?” Mo’s eyes narrow to a flinty stare, but she holds her peace. Pete nods thoughtfully.

“Golden Promise? The big tent revival meetings in Docklands?” I nod. “Pastor thingummy, um, Schiller—he’s one of the bigger American Midwestern TV Charlies”—he glances at Sandy apologetically—“but there’s something not quite right about him. Did I tell you about Dorothy”—Sandy nods—“one of my parishioners? Special needs, learning disability. And no, we’ve got two or three Dorothys, I’m not telling you which one it is. Anyway, she went along and found it very disturbing. Well, not at first, but he’s actively recruiting. And trying to get people to go along to a series of church meetings his people are running in South London. They’re clearly Presbyterians who are hot on fundamentals theology, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Stuff that smells a bit cultish, frankly. They’ve got the usual unhealthy obsession with homosexuality and so on; but what upset Dorothy was that they were trying to fix her up with a husband. Trying to get her to join a Christian dating ring. Which might be fine if they’d bothered to ask, but Dorothy has—let’s just say she has issues. They were quite pushy, and really freaked the poor girl out.”

Mo nods slowly. Looking at me, she asks Pete out of one corner of her mouth, “Are they by any chance a quiverfull ministry?”

Pete’s lips thin. “Yes.”

The word “quiverfull” sets my alarm bells ringing, and clearly upsets Mo. It goes back to Psalm 127, which refers to having many children as having a full quiver. They’re arrows for the Lord, and a number of evangelical churches have adopted the theory that you can never have too much ammunition. The Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh has a history of using such churches as cover for their cells. They have other uses for children, as recruits and—let’s not go there over dinner.

“You disapprove?” I ask.

Pete sniffs. “I’m in the business of providing spiritual and pastoral care for my parishioners,” he points out. “Pressuring a confused and vulnerable young woman into an arranged marriage in order to turn her into a baby factory is not how you look after her spiritual needs—” He stops, revealing a momentary flash of anger. “Sorry. Not your problem.” He pauses. “I probably said too much there,” he adds.

“It will go no further,” Mo assures him.

“Absolutely.”

Sandy, who has been holding her breath without me being consciously aware of it, exhales loudly enough that I nearly jump. I notice that her wineglass is empty. I pick up the bottle. “Can I offer you a refill?” I ask, a little white lie because now I think about it she didn’t ask for one in the first place—

“No thanks.” Her cheeks dimple. “I’m avoiding alcohol for the next few months.”

Mo catches the dropped penny first: “Congratulations! How long—”

“It’s been nearly ten weeks. We’re not out of the first trimester yet, I wasn’t going to announce it for a little longer.”

Opposite me, Pete’s expression has switched from muted disapproval to the smug anticipation of fatherhood-to-be.

“Congratulations to the two of you,” I say slowly. “Well, good luck with that.” I lower the wine bottle and pick up my glass. “Here’s to sleepless nights ahead, huh?”

Mo raises her glass, too, keeping her expression under rigid control. But I can see right through it; right to the core of delight for their joy, and suppressed envy for Sandy’s condition, and above all else, horror at the fate they’ve unwittingly condemned themselves to.

LATE THAT NIGHT, AS WE LIE IN BED, I FEEL MO’S SHOULDERS shake. I slide an arm around her, try to provide comfort. She’s crying, silently and piteously to break a man’s heart; and the worst part is that I can’t do anything about the cause of her grief.

We’re not going to have children.

For months now, and for decades to come, we’ve been living on borrowed time. I can feel it in the prickling in my fingers and toes, in the strange shapes and warped dead languages of my dreams. We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.

Outside the edge of our conscious perceptions, the walls between the worlds are thinning. Things that listen to thoughts and attend are gathering, shadows and fragments of cognition and computation. The Laundry has a code name for this phenomenon: CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics: solve theorems, invoke actions, actions occur. Program computers to do ditto, actions occur faster and more reliably. So far so good, this is what I do for a living. But consciousness is also a computational process. Human minds are conscious, there are too damn many of us in too small a volume of space on this planet right now, and we’re damaging the computational ultrastructure of reality. Too much of our kind of magic going on makes magic easier to perform—for a while, until space itself rips open and the nightmares come out to play.

But that’s not why we aren’t going to start a family. Abstract principles aren’t sufficient. No, it’s a lot simpler: we know the sort of thing that’s likely to happen during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and we’re not selfish enough—or evil enough—to condemn a child of ours to die that way.

There’s going to be an epidemic of dementia—not mad cow disease, new variant CJD, but something our house doctors call Krantzberg syndrome: if a sorcerer unintentionally thinks the wrong thoughts, performs magic by mind, the listeners and feeders and actors they invoke from the quantum foam take tiny bites out of their brains. Dream the wrong dreams, and you can wake up with a palsy or an aneurysm.

There will be amazement and miracles, too. Magic wands stuffed with silicon chips that work wonders. Twisted biological creations that obey our directives. Ordinary people discovering they have the power to summon demons and angels and warp reality to their will. Somnolent sentient species rising from the deeps to take an interest in the suddenly interesting land-dwelling aboriginals. Alien emissaries, and powers beyond our comprehension like the Sleeper in the Pyramid—

—Monstrous conquerors no bullet or atom bomb can kill—

—And their willing servants.

No, this isn’t a sensible decade to start a family. Especially not for the likes of Mo and me, insiders and experts with a ringside seat at the circus of horrors.

WEDNESDAY MORNING DAWNS, GRAY AND MOIST. I YAWN, ROLL out of bed, and stumble downstairs to the kitchen to switch on the kettle. I glance at the clock: it’s a quarter to seven. I shiver, the skin on the soles of my feet sticking to the cold linoleum. We talked, for a bit, when the tears dried, then I slept fitfully. No dreams of the plateau and the pyramid, which is a small blessing. But today is a workday, and I’ve got at least one meeting booked in the office. I reach for my phone, which is still sitting on the kitchen table where I left it last night—

There’s a notification. A call. I blink, bleary-eyed. Six forty-two last night, from oh fuck it’s Lockhart. There is voicemail. I listen to it. “See me first thing tomorrow morning. Bring your bag. Be prepared to travel.” Click. He doesn’t sound happy: probably expected the good little minion to be in the office until whenever he felt like going home. I yawn, then get the coffee started.

Half an hour later Mo and I are sitting opposite each other across the table. Toast, marmalade, a cafetière full of French roast. Mo is showing signs of sleeplessness, yawning. “I had a bad dream,” she remarks over the coffee.

“Bad enough to remember?”

“Very.” She shivers. “I was alone in the house. Upstairs, in the attic.” The roof space is big enough that we’ve been planning to add a dormer window and turn it into a spare room one of these years. “There was—this is going to sound cheesy, but it was just a dream—a window. Under the window, there was a cradle, and a woman in a chair sitting next to it with her back to me. I couldn’t see very clearly, and her face was in shadow, or she was wearing a veil, or there was something between us. She had a bow, and she was playing—lullabies. Except I couldn’t hear them. To the crib. Although I couldn’t see anything in it.”

“Um.” There’s no way to say this tactfully, so I don’t. “Are you sure it was empty? Because if so, that’s classic projection—”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I know what you’re thinking.” She looks troubled. “The thing is, in my dream I knew the melody. It was familiar from somewhere. Only I don’t. It’s not a tune I’ve ever heard. And I’m not sure the crib was empty. But it was definitely my instrument.”

And now it’s my turn to look troubled, because nobody in their right mind would play lullabies to a baby on Mo’s violin. It’s an Erich Zahn original, with a body as white as the bone it’s carved from, refitted with electric pick-ups and retuned to make ears and eyeballs bleed. It has other properties, too.

“Have a bagel,” I suggest, buying myself some time to chew on the problem. “It sounds like projection, but if you think it’s something else…well.” A thought strikes me. “The violin?”

“Huh.” Mo glances at the corner of the room. She brought the violin downstairs. It’s still in its case. Come to think of it, the only time she leaves it in another room is when she’s having a bath or a shower. “Think it’s jealous?”

She shivers. “Don’t say that.”

“My new boss phoned,” I say to change the subject. “Told me to bring my go-bag. I might be late for dinner.”

“Oh.” She stands up and walks around the table. “So soon?”

“Can’t be sure. Hope not.” I stand up and we embrace, awkwardly because of the coffee mug glued to the palm of my right hand (it’s a shape-shifting leech that feeds on fatigue poisons in my blood; it’ll fall off when I’m fully awake).

“Take care. Remember to write. Or call, if you can keep track of the time zones.”

“I shall.” I remember something. “Pinky had a little toy waiting for me. Not the kind of toy that’s supposed to go walkabout, I think. Your doing?”

“What toy—oh, that. I don’t think so. But last week Angleton made a point of asking me the kind of hypothetical question that’s not so hypothetical: I reminded him about that time in Amsterdam.” The hole in a hotel corridor’s wall, blowing air into vacuum in a dead-cold world beneath the blue-shifted pinprick stars of a dying cosmos. Pinky’s little toy is the direct lineal descendant of the machine they issued me for self-defense back then. “Promise me you’re going to make sure you don’t get into a situation where you need it. Please, Bob?”

I shudder. “I promise. You know what I think of violence.”

“And you’ll draw a new ward. And a HOG. Two HOGs. And you’ll brush your teeth every night. Okay?”

I kiss her. “Sure.”

And, oddly, when I go in to work later that morning my first stop is the armory, just to draw a new and unused protective ward and a pair of mummified pigeons’ feet in leather bags. I draw the line at toothpaste, though.

“AH, MR. HOWARD. COME IN. YOU’RE LATE.” LOCKHART IS CHARACTERISTICALLY curt, but despite the routine chewing-out—I am getting a feeling that this is his usual way of relating to his staff, in which case it’s bloody juvenile and I wish he’d get over it—he seems somewhat pleased with himself.

I shut the door. “Has something come up?”

“You could say that.” The smugness is threatening to burst out. “Yesterday BASHFUL INCENDIARY’s invitation to attend a session of the Omega Course came through. It’s a weekend residential session held at the Golden Promise Ministries headquarters, just north of Colorado Springs, and it starts this Friday. We’ve been trying to get someone inside there for weeks. She’s already on her way there by way of New York, along with Mr. McTavish. So you’d better get moving, eh?”

“Wait a minute. The tattoos—”

“You’ll just have to play catch-up with her in Colorado, Mr. Howard.”

“Okay. What then? What’s the plan? What’s she doing, do we know?”

“I couldn’t possibly say.” Lockhart’s eyes narrow. “BASHFUL INCENDIARY is not one of your, or my, or our department’s employees, so in principle she could be doing anything. As it is, she’s clearly engaged in surveillance activities directed against a protégé of the PM. We are therefore sending you to Denver to keep an eye on her and find out what’s going on. We devoutly hope that she will find it amusing to confide in you from time to time, Mr. Howard. That is all you or I know, to be sure. Do I make myself understood?”

“I think so.” I pause. “Isn’t this a little bit open-ended…?”

“Clever boy. Yes, it is.” He nods sharply. Then he picks up a black nylon travel document wallet from his desk and hands it over, along with a form. “Sign this.”

“Sign what—” It’s a receipt. “Just a sec, you know I need to check the contents.”

“Take your time.”

I open the wallet. It contains a passport and a bunch of boarding passes. Return from London to Denver, business class, fully flexible—my eyebrows are clawing at the ceiling even before I see the next item.

“You’ll need to sign that, too,” Lockhart adds.

“But, bu-but—” I don’t usually stutter, honest, but it’s the first time I’ve seen one of these things in the wild: Aren’t they supposed to come on a velvet cushion escorted by a couple of snooty liveried footmen and an armed guard? “This is a gold Visa card. A Coutts gold Visa card.”

“For expenses.” Lockhart sounds perfectly matter-of-fact.

“But, but…” Coutts is a small, obscure, remarkably stuffy financial institution in London. It used to be private but these days it’s the posh subsidiary of one of the mega-banks. Owner of banking license 002—001 belongs to the Bank of England—they won’t even give you a cheque account unless you maintain a minimum balance of a quarter of a million. The Queen banks with Coutts. (Although apparently they had second thoughts about her son: maybe he lowers the tone, or something.) They’ve become a little more accessible since the RBS takeover—I gather they’ll give accounts to rock stars and presidents these days—but even so. “What will the Auditors say?” I finish weakly.

“Nothing, as long as you keep proper records.”

“But, but…what?”

“Mr. Howard. Robert.” Lockhart lowers his voice and speaks slowly and clearly, as if to an idiot child: “You are pursuing an investigation on behalf of External Assets. It’s an open-ended assignment. Let us be very clear, I am handing you a sufficiency of rope with which to hang yourself, should you choose to do so—but we have no way of anticipating what you may run up against. So we’re equipping you accordingly.”

He taps the rectangle of plastic. “This card draws against an account held by the Ministry of Defense—supposedly for entertaining visiting Saudi royalty or equally dubious people. You can pay for your incidentals and subsistence, within reason: hotel bills and car hire and so forth. Just keep receipts. This particular card comes with a call center in London, manned around the clock by a concierge service that will arrange just about any personal service you desire at the drop of a hat—as long as it’s legal. You can hire an executive jet or pay for an emergency liver transplant. You can draw ten thousand pounds in cash per day. It’s the most powerful weapon in your inventory, notwithstanding the silly little toy camera your friends in Facilities have loaned you, or the dead pigeons’ feet in your toilet bag.”

He clears his throat. “I gather you’ve met the Auditors. Just remember that this isn’t your own money and you won’t have anything to worry about.”

“I thought you said that we’re outside Operational Oversight?”

His gaze is icy. “We are,” he says. “But the Auditors make random inspections. And we can always make an exception if you really fuck up.”

“Urp.” I flip the card over and scrawl on the signature strip. Then I sign the receipt. “Okay.” I open the passport. It’s for me, okay, but it’s shiny and new, with the enhanced security biometrics, and there’s an extra page bonded into it—a diplomatic visa good for the United States, accrediting me as a junior cultural attaché at the British embassy in DC. “We still have cultural attachés?”

“We still have pulse-dialing electromechanical Strowger telephone exchanges in the basement”—Lockhart startles me by suddenly rattling off the correct but decades-obsolete terminology—“just in case we experience a need for such equipment. And you are now discovering just why we also have cultural attachés in the embassy in DC.”

“Ri-ight.” I glance at the first boarding pass. “Hey, this leaves Heathrow in less than three hours!”

“So you’d better get moving, Mr. Howard. The tag for your reports is GOD GAME BLACK. Don’t forget to write!”

THE NEXT FOURTEEN HOURS HAVE THEIR HIGHS AND LOWS.

The highs: taking a cab to Paddington, breezing through the barriers onto the Heathrow Express, arriving at the airport nineteen minutes later, and zipping through all the usual inconveniences and impediments of air travel as if they barely exist. Priority check-in, special security screening arrangements with no queue, then forty minutes to catch my breath in a slightly run-down business lounge (with free wine and beer! If only I wasn’t on business) and then priority boarding. There are no queues—at least nothing worthy of the name—and my ticket comes with a reclining chair and the kind of meal service that convinces me British Airways are engaged in a sinister conspiracy to prepare their frequent fliers’ livers for sale to a pâté factory.

The lows: arriving at JFK to change flights, entering the diplomatic queue in the vast, echoing cowshed that is the immigration hall, and waiting as the uniformed immigration officer stares at my passport, types at his computer, then stares some more until I get that familiar old-time sinking feeling.

“Is there a problem?” I ask, pitching my voice for curious-casual.

He glances up and looks at me. “Please look into the camera, sir.” There’s an eyeball on a stalk—that’s new since I last visited the USA—and I mug for it. “Fingerprints.” That’s new, too. Come to think of it, I haven’t been over here for a decade and my last visit didn’t end well. “Hmm. You’re traveling on an embassy visa, sir. Can I ask the purpose of your visit?”

I’ve been briefed on what to say. “I am here on official business of Her Majesty’s Government.” I try not to look apologetic. “I am an accredited member of a diplomatic mission—accredited by your own State Department—and I am not required to discuss my business.”

I don’t see him press the magic button, but there’s some discreet movement behind him: another Customs and Border Patrol officer—this one a guard—is drifting over, and an office door at the other side of the barn is opening, someone coming out. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting a minute, sir, my manager will take this from here.” Another officer has sidled across the entrance to the tollbooth-like tunnel I’m occupying, effectively blocking my retreat.

“May I have my passport back?” I ask.

“Not yet.”

Palms damp and pulse racing, I try to look bored. It takes an endless minute for the woman in the suit to get here from the office. The immigration goons are courteous but distant—and they’re armed, and a law unto themselves. Also, some kind of shit has definitely hit the fan because they’re absolutely not supposed to stop someone traveling on a diplomatic visa. At least (I remind myself) I shaved halfway through the flight, and look reasonably presentable—credit Lockhart for making me wear a suit—but—

“Mr. Howard?” The CBP manager is a woman, about my age, east Asian. “Would you mind coming with me?”

“Is there a problem?” I ask.

She looks at me, assessing and evaluating. “Hopefully not, but you must appreciate we need to ensure that only people entitled to use the diplomatic channel do so”—she takes my passport from Goon #1—“so if you’d come this way, please?”

I don’t have any alternatives unless I want to escalate drastically, and they haven’t actually done anything that amounts to good cause yet. I fall in behind her, and try not to pay attention to Goon #3, who is trailing us at a distance, his belt clanking under the weight of handcuffs, pepper spray, and a sidearm.

The office is spartan, bare-walled and furnished with a desk, two chairs, a computer, and a telephone. The CBP manager waves me to the seat opposite the desk, then sits down and starts mousing around on her computer. I pointedly don’t glance at the door—I’m pretty sure Goon #3 is standing outside. Presently she looks up. “Mr. Howard, I believe that these documents are genuine, and I recognize your diplomatic immunity. However, you’re identified by our records as being a covert asset. I must warn you that failing to register as an agent of a foreign government is a felony, and potential grounds for denying you entry to the United States. Do you have anything to say?”

Her body language clearly adds: Aside from oh shit? She looks smug. It’s clearly not every day that Little Ms. Smarty-Pants here catches a spook.

“I’m not in your Big Book of Registered Spies? Is that the problem?”

She looks down her nose at me. “One of them.”

“Well.” I roll my eyes. “That’s a nice Catch-22 you’ve got there, isn’t it? Real shiny, that Catch-22.”

(I blame the Russians for spoiling everything. Time was when a spy could just breeze through US immigration and be about their business—but the CBP have been pissed ever since the FBI caught a battalion of barely competent FSB agents who waltzed in behind a brass band and set up shop in Manhattan. And this is, of course, a representative of the NYC local chapter of the Cantankerous Bastards Patrol that I’m dealing with, not the State Department.)

“Let me see: I think in the next five minutes you’re going to”—I notice her neck muscles and shoulders tensing—“call DC and talk to State. Who will in turn talk to an officer from one of your government’s black agencies which do not exist, and then State will tell you what you need to know, which is that they’ve heard of me and you are to let me go. Or we can do this the hard way. You can refuse me entry, provoke a diplomatic incident, and then an agency which does not exist will arrange for your superiors to tear you a new asshole.” I lean back, cross my arms, and try to look confident. “Your call.”

It’s only about twenty-five percent bluff. I am on the books: the Black Chamber know who I am, and if I’ve come up on the CBP radar there’ll be a contact number in the office directory. What happens to her if she’s stupid or insane enough to phone and attract the Black Chamber’s attention is anybody’s guess—eaten by Nazgûl, spirited away to a detention center at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay, compelled to listen to Rick Wakeman until her brain melts—but I don’t really care. The Black Chamber will ensure that I cease to be a person of interest to the CBP. The only question that interests me is whether the phrase “of interest to the CBP” belongs at the end of that sentence.

(Aha, I can hear you asking, but what about the UK-USA intelligence treaty? Why didn’t Lockhart just call the Black Chamber and ask them to keep an eye on our turbulent priest? Well, there are several reasons. Firstly, our turbulent preacher is American; it’s even possible he’s one of theirs. Secondly, we’re really not supposed to give foreign agencies blackmail-grade information about the Prime Minister. And finally: they’re the Black Chamber. They’re not so much our sister agency as our psycho ex-girlfriend turned bunny-boiler.)

In the event, Ms. Smarty-Pants glares at me and calls my non-existent bluff. “Okay, that’s your choice.” Then she reaches out and picks up the phone and dials.

I am jet-lagged, tired, and—I will admit—a bit scared. I wait, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to simply let them declare me PNG and stick me on the next plane home. But it’s too late for that: someone answers the phone. “Sir, I’ve just taken custody of a traveler on the DSR watch list…yes, I’ll hold…hello? Yes, I have a traveler on the DSR watch list, he’s flagged as a POI to AGATE STAR…thank you, sir, yes, his name is Howard, Robert Oscar Foxtrot Howard, record number 908…”

She stops talking and listens for a couple of minutes, nodding from time to time. Her eyebrows furrow slightly. Then whoever’s at the other end of the line hangs up on her. She stares at the handset for a few seconds, almost angrily, then puts it down. “That makes no sense,” she mutters, as if she’s forgotten I’m there. Then she glares at me. “What are you doing here?”

“You’ve got my passport,” I say helpfully.

“I—” She blinks rapidly, then looks at the offending document, sitting on the desk. “Oh.” She looks unhappy about something: probably me. She pulls open a desk drawer, withdraws a stamp, and whacks away at a blank page in the passport. “Get out.”

“Am I free to enter?” I ask.

“Yes! You’re free to enter.” She’s angry—and clearly frightened.

Interesting; things have definitely changed since I was last here. “Aren’t you required to register me as an agent of a foreign power?”

Her pupils dilate. “No! Just go! You weren’t here, I’m not here, this never happened, nobody stopped you, go away!” She stands up and yanks the door open. “Nick! Escort Mr. Howard to baggage claim and see he gets through Customs without any delays! He has a flight to catch!”

Nick—Goon #3—looks puzzled. “Isn’t he under arrest?”

“No! His papers are all in order. Just get him out of here!”

Her concern is contagious. Nick looks at me and gestures. “This way, sir.”

And so I enter the United States with a Border Patrol escort—desperate to see me on my way as fast as is humanly possible.

What strange times we live in…