The Fuller Memorandum

4. PROMPT CRITICAL

HOSPITALS ARE BORING PLACES: MY ADVICE IS TO AVOID THEM wherever possible, unless you happen to work there. Unfortunately I’m not always good at taking my own advice, which is why I spend three hours in the A&E unit, having my head bolted back together.

Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s just a bash and a scrape to my scalp: but head wounds bleed like crazy and they wanted to make sure I wasn’t concussed and didn’t have a fractured skull or a subdural hematoma or something. Then it was time for about a million butterfly sutures and I’m told I may never be able to take the paper bag off in public again, but that’s okay because they let me go home with Mo and the nice folks from Plumbing who look like extras from The Matrix.

Being attacked by a demonically possessed Russian with a silenced pistol is unusual but not exceptional in my line of work; sloppy of me not to have replaced my ward, though, or to have checked the spy lens in the door before opening up. Inexcusable not to have noticed that Andy’s messenger was at least half an hour early, too . . . but in my defense, I wasn’t exactly expecting to be attacked by a demonically possessed Russian with a silenced pistol. (At least, I assume he was Russian. He was speaking Russian, wasn’t he? I have some broken schoolboy French: therefore I’m from Quebec. Such are the perils of inductive logic. It was certainly demonic possession: probably class two, one of the minor feeders in the night. Otherwise I’d be worse than dead.)

Anyway. The point is, that sort of thing is just not done, at least not without some degree of warning, especially to someone who’s signed off sick for the rest of the week—I’m feeling distinctly peeved. It’s unprofessional . I’m just lucky Mo realized something was wrong and grabbed her violin in time to switch him off. She may be pale and shaking in the aftermath of—something very bad, I guess—but she’s a trouper, or trooper, or something, and her reflexes are everything that mine are not.

When we get home, our house has been invaded by spooks. An entire team of Plumbers are at work, rewiring the perimeter defenses and daubing exclusion sigils on the window frames. Andy is sitting at the kitchen table, tapping his fingers, briefcase open, which makes it official: it’s serious enough to drag management off-site. “Bob, Mo, good to see you!” He sounds relieved, which is worrying.

“Letter of Release.” I cross my arms.

“You don’t need it.” Andy glances at Mo. “Whether we like it or not, Bob is now involved in CLUB ZERO. At least, I’m assuming that’s what followed you home . . .”

“Oh dear,” she says heavily, and pulls out a chair. “Bob, I really didn’t want—”

“Too late, whatever it is.” I grimace. I still feel a little sick, but it’s mostly overspill from the music—not concussion, just a little totenlied—and I’m heartsick for her, too. “Andy, what’s going on?”

“Angleton’s missing,” he says, with a curious little half smile, as if he’s just cracked a really filthy joke and is wondering if you’ve even heard of the perversion he’s alluding to.

“Angleton’s what?” says Mo, just as I open my mouth to say exactly the same thing.

“He’s missing. Do you have any information . . . no, I guess not.” His cheek twitches.

Mo reaches across the table and takes my hand. I barely notice.

Angleton is just about the bedrock of the department. Yes, his position is shrouded in rumor and misinformation—to some, he’s simply a DSS, a Detached Special Secretary doing boring and esoteric work in Arcana Analysis; to others he’s involved in the occult equivalent of counterespionage: but the truth is a lot weirder. Angleton actually gets to talk to the Board, who nobody has actually seen in the flesh in forty years. He’s the whetstone that sharpens the cutting edge of the blade our political masters fancy they wield when they tell us what to do: the dog’s bollocks, in other words. He’s not the heart of the Laundry—no one person is ever indispensable to any well-run agency—but he’s probably important enough that if he is indeed missing, things are going to get unpleasantly exciting.

“What happened?” Mo asks.

“He missed a meeting this morning. I went to look in on him—he wasn’t in his office. A couple of hours later I ran into Sally Alvarez from Accounting, and she said he’d missed a meeting, too. So I began asking around, and it transpires that he didn’t check in this morning. Nobody’s seen him since he went home yesterday evening.” Andy’s bright and brittle tone reminds me of a thin layer of paint applied to cover the ominous cracks in the plaster that widen and shift over time . . .

“Why didn’t you phone him at home?” asks Mo.

“Because there’s no home phone number on file for him!” Andy grins manically. “No address, for that matter, would you believe it? HR don’t have any contact details at all! Just a bank account and a PO Box for correspondence.”

“But that’s—”

“Ridiculous?” Andy’s smile slips. “Yes, I’d have said so, but remember this is Angleton we’re talking about. Did either of you see him yesterday?”

The phrase “Yes, I did” escapes before I can press my lips together. Mo gives me a withering look. “I’m not concealing anything,” I tell her: “Nothing to hide!”

Andy goes for the jugular. “Tell me. Everything.”

“Not much to tell.” I slump back on my chair. “I was on my way home, but I figured I’d drop in on him on the way.” I frown, then wince as the butterfly stitches on my forehead tell me not to be an idiot. “Thing is, the other day—he sent me to Cosford to see something in a hangar—”

“The exorcism that went wrong,” Andy interrupts.

“No, not the exorcism—something else, something in the museum. It’s his usual showing-not-telling thing: he wanted me to see it before he explained. So I dropped in to talk to him because I didn’t manage to get to Hangar 12B in the end. He spun me some kind of line about an RAF squadron that was decommissioned in 1964, some photoreconnaissance unit or other, and gave me some file references to follow up next week. Squadron 666, he said. Yes, it was tangentially connected, but there’s no bloody way of knowing what he’s got in mind until you follow the trail of bread crumbs he lays out for you—you know how he is, mind as twisty as a derivatives trader. Then he said something about wanting me to deputize for him on a codeword committee, something like BLOODY BARON.”

“Damn. What time was this?”

“About twelve, twelve fifteen, I think. It was right after my session with Iris and Jo Sullivan. Why?”

“Because he was in the Ways and Means monthly breakout session on pandemic suppression systems that ran from two to four, according to at least six eyewitnesses.” Andy looks gloomy. “Whatever happened, it wasn’t you.” He glances at Mo. “What time did Boris call you?”

She jerks upright and pulls her hand away from me. “Around noon. Why?”

“Hmm. Doesn’t fit.” The pall hanging over him is threatening to throw a miniature thunderstorm. “You didn’t run into”—he jerks his chin sharply over his shoulder: in the hall, one of the Plumbers is reinscribing a Dho-Nha curve on the wall with a protractor and a Rotring pen full of colloidal silver ink—“until after, so it’s not that . . .”

“What’s not that?” I ask.

Andy takes a deep breath.

“Angleton’s missing, work is following people home, and the Russians are trying to put the dead back into ‘dead letter drop.’ You know the old saying, twice is coincidence but three times is enemy action? Well, right now I think it applies . . .”

“Was our visitor Russian?” Mo leans forward.

“Don’t know.” Andy looks mulish. “Did you get any indication of what he wanted?”

“He kept asking something,” I volunteer. “In at least two different languages, neither of which I speak.”

“Oh great,” he mutters. Stretching, he shakes his head. “Been a bad day so far, going to be a long one as well. Don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea?”

“Certainly—for you I can recommend the special herbal teas, monk’s hood and spurge laurel, although if you insist I can make a pot of Tetley’s . . .”

“That’d be fine.” Mo’s sarcasm flies right past him, which is the final warning I need that Andy is about ready to drop. Time to ease up on him a little, maybe, if he grovels for it.

“I’ll get it,” I say, standing up. “So let me see . . . Boris is running some kind of operation code named BLOODY BARON which involves something going down in Amsterdam which required Mo’s offices, and—”

They’re both shaking their heads at me. “No, no,” says Andy, and:

“Amsterdam was CLUB ZERO,” says Mo. “It’s a sideshow, and . . . did you bring that letter?” Andy produces an envelope. She pockets it: “Thanks.”

“Actually, it all boils down to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN,” Andy says heavily. “The other operations are side projects; CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is where it all starts.”

“Oh yes?” I ask casually, although those words send a chill up my spine.

“Yes.” He laughs halfheartedly. “It appears we may have been working under some false operating assumptions,” he adds. “The situation seems to be deteriorating . . .”

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE END OF the world.

You might have noticed that Mo and I have no children. We don’t even have a pet cat, the consolation prize of the overworked urban middle classes. There’s a reason for this. Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?

We human beings live at the bottom of a thin puddle of oxygen-nitrogen vapor adhering to the surface of a medium-sized rocky planet that orbits a not terribly remarkable star in a cosmos which is one of many. We are not alone. There are other beings in other universes, other cosmologies, that think, and travel, and explore. And there are aliens in the abyssal depths of the oceans, and dwellers in the red-hot blackness and pressure of the upper mantle, that are stranger than your most florid hallucinations. They’re terrifyingly powerful, the inheritors of millennia of technological civilization; they were building starships and opening timegates back when your ancestors and mine were clubbing each other over the head with rocks to settle the eternal primate disagreement over who had the bigger dick.

But the Deep Ones and the Chthonians are dust beneath the feet of the elder races, just as much so as are we bumptious bonobo cousins. The elder races are ancient. Supposedly they colonized our planet back in the pre-Cambrian age. Don’t bother looking for their relics, though—continents have risen and sunk since then, the very atmosphere has changed density and composition, the moon orbits three times farther out, and to cut a long story short, they went away.

But the elder races are as dust beneath the many-angled appendages of the dead gods, who—

You stopped reading about a paragraph back, didn’t you? Admit it: you’re bored. So I’ll just skip to the point: we have a major problem. The dimensions of the problem are defined by computational density and geometry. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, after all, and when you process information, you set up waves in the platonic ultrastructure of reality that can amplify and reinforce—

To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality. The weirdness is already going macroscopic—has been, for decades, as any disciple of Forteana could tell you. Sometime really soon, we’re going to cross a critical threshold which, in combination with our solar system’s ongoing drift through a stellar neighborhood where space itself is stretched thin, is going to make it likely that certain sleeping agencies will stir in their aeons-long slumber, and notice us.

No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by smashing all our computers and going back to pencils and paper—if we did that, our amazingly efficient just-in-time food delivery logistics would go down the pan and we’d all starve. No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by holding a brisk nuclear war and frying the guys with the biggest dicks—induced megadeaths have consequences that can be exploited for much the same ends, as the Ahnenerbe-SS discovered to their cost.

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the demonological equivalent of an atomic chain reaction. Human minds equal plutonium nuclei. Put too many of them together in too small a place, and they begin to get a wee bit hot. Cross the threshold suddenly and emphatically and they get a lot hot. And the elder gods wake up, smell the buffet, and prepare to tuck in.

Our organization was formed as the British Empire’s occult countermeasures organization during the struggle against Nazism, but it has continued to this day, serving a similar purpose: to protect the nation from an entire litany of lethal metanatural threats, culminating in the goal of surviving CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. The UK’s in a good position: a developed country, overwhelmingly urban (meaning its inhabitants are located in compact, defensible cities) with nearly neutral population size (no hot spots), and the world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems. If you think the UK’s been sliding into an Orwellian nightmare for the past decade, policed by cameras on every doorstep, you’re right—but there is a reason for it: the MAGINOT BLUE STARS defense network and its SCORPION STARE basilisk cameras are fully deployed, ready to track and zap the first outbreaks. There are other, less obvious defensive measures. Our budget’s been rising lately; ever wondered why there are so many police vans with cameras on the streets?

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is coming, and it’s going to be perilous in the extreme. It’s a bigger threat than global warming, peak oil, and the cold war rolled into one. We may not live to see the light at the other end of the tunnel, as we finally drift out from the fatal conjunction and the baleful stars close their eyes and reality returns to normal. Survival is far from assured—it may not even be likely. But one thing’s for sure: we’re going to give it our best shot.

THAT EVENING, AFTER THE PLUMBERS HAVE UPGRADED OUR defenses and Andy has finished picking our brains and left, I order in a curry—paying strict attention to the spy-hole this time when answering the doorbell—then retreat upstairs with Mo, a bottle of single malt, and a box of very expensive chocolates I’ve been hoarding against an evening like this. I’m dead tired, my face throbs around the butterfly sutures, and I feel unspeakably old. Mo . . . is better than she was earlier, for what it’s worth.

“Here.” I pass her the Booja-Booja box as I sit on the edge of the bed and unroll my socks.

“Oh, you shouldn’t—did you set the alarm?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

The rest of my clothes are piling up atop the socks: “Trust me, any burglar who tries their luck tonight is going to get the biggest shock of their life.” Biggest, because afterwards they’re going to run out of life in which to cap it. “Remember you need to deactivate it before you set foot on the stairs. Or open any windows.”

“And if the house burns down . . .”

“And if the house burns down, yes.” I shove the pillows up against the headboard. “We’re safe here, as safe as can be.” Which isn’t saying much if the bombshell Andy dropped turns out to be true, but I’m not about to remind her of that. I lean back. “A wee dram?”

“Don’t mind if I do. How about death by chocolate?”

“Sounds good to me.”

For a minute we’re silent; me filling two glasses, Mo working her way into the box of cocoa-dusted delights. Presently we exchange gifts. Outside, it’s raining: the rattle and slap of water on glass merges with the distant noise of wheels on wet road surfaces, but inside our insulated, centrally heated bubble of suburbia we’re isolated from the world.

“By the way, I haven’t said thank you, have I?” she asks.

“What for?”

“Picking up the pieces, bollocking Andy for me, being a dear, that sort of thing. Just existing, when you get down to it.”

“Um.” I put my glass down. “Thank you. For saving my life this afternoon—”

“—but if you hadn’t punched his legs out from under him he’d have shot me—”

“—he was going to shoot me first! Did you see where—”

We stop, looking at each other in mutual disbelief and incomprehension.

“How did we get here?” I ask her.

“I don’t know.” She frowns, then offers me the box of chocolates.

“Pick one.”

I pick something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a hedgehog, except that it smells better. “Why?”

“Let’s see . . . that one’s unique in this collection, right? Let’s consider life as a box of chocolates. All of them are unique. Let each chocolate be a, a significant event. All we can say of any chocolate before we eat it is that it was selected from the slowly diminishing set of chocolates we have not already encountered. But one thing they’ve all got in common is—”

“Theobroma cacao,” I say, shoving it in my mouth and chewing. “Mmph.”

“Yes. Now, let Theobroma cacao stand for the defining characteristics of our reality. We don’t know precisely what the next chocolate will be, but we expect it to be brown and taste heavenly. But the previous chocolates we’ve eaten have narrowed the field of choice, and if, say, we’ve been picking the crunchy pralines selectively, we may find ourselves experiencing an unexpected run of soft centers—”

“I thought we were taking them at random?”

“No; we’re picking them—without a menu card—but we can choose them on the basis of their appearance, are you with me? We can choose our inputs but not the outputs that result from them. And we have a diminishing array of options—”

“What kind of chocolate did you pick in Amsterdam?” I ask.

She pulls a face. “Wormwood. Or maybe Amanita phalloides.” (The death cap mushroom, so called because the folks who name poisonous toadstools have no sense of humor: it’s shaped like a cap, and you die if you eat it.)

“Are you ready to talk about it?”

She takes a sip of Lagavulin. “Not yet.” Her lips twitch in the faintest ghostly echo of a smile—“But just knowing I can unload when I need to—” She shudders, then abruptly knocks back the contents of her glass in one.

“Do you believe Andy?” she asks, presently.

“I wish I didn’t have to.” I pause. “You mean, about the, the—”

“The acceleration.”

“Yeah, that.” I fall silent for a moment. “I’m not sure. I mean, he says it came out of Dr. Ford’s work in Research and Development, using analytical methods to observe bias in stochastic sequential observations at widely separated sites, and Mike Ford’s not the kind of man to make a mistake.” Sly and subtle, with a warped sense of humor—and a mind sharp enough to cut diamond, that’s our avuncular Dr. Ford. “I’d love to hear what Cantor’s deep-duration research team at St. Hilda’s made of it, but I suspect you’d have to go all the way to Mahogany Row to get permission to talk to them about current work—they’re sandboxed for a reason.” Mostly to protect everybody else’s sanity: it’s a team of no less than four DSS-grade sorcerers working on a single research project for more than thirty years. They’ve grown more than slightly weird along the way. Just talking to them, then thinking too hard about their answers can put you at risk of developing Krantzberg syndrome, the horrible encephalopathy that tends to afflict people who spend too much time thinking about symbolic magic. (The map is one with the territory; think too hard about the wrong theorems and you shouldn’t be surprised if extradimensional entities start chewing microscopic chunks out of your gray matter.)

“I want to see Ford’s raw data,” Mo says thoughtfully. “Someone ought to give it a good working-over, looking for artifacts.”

“Yeah.”

She puts her glass down and plants the box of chocolates on top of it. “If the acceleration is real, we’ve only got a few months left.”

And there’s the rub. What Ford has detected—so Andy told us—is an accelerating rip in the probabilistic ultrastructure of spacetime.

If it exists (if Dr. Ford is right) the first sign is that it will amplify the efficacy of all our thaumaturgic tools. But it’ll gather pace rapidly from there. He’s predicting a phase-change, like a pile of plutonium that’s decided to lurch from ordinary criticality—the state of a controlled nuclear reactor—to prompt criticality—a sudden unwanted outburst of power, halfway between a normal nuclear reaction and a nuclear explosion. Nobody predicted this before: we all expected CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to switch on with a bang, not a weeks-long transition, an explosion rather than a meltdown. For a few days, we’ll be gods—before it tears the walls of the world apart, and lets the nightmares in.

“Ought to make the best use of what time we’ve got left,” she thinks aloud.

I put my glass down and roll on my side, to face her. “Yes.”

“Come here,” she says, stretching her free arm towards me.

Outside the window, the wild darkness claws at our frail bubble of light and warmth, ignored and temporarily forgotten in our primate frenzy. But its time will come.

THE NEXT MORNING WE OVERSLEEP, BY MUTUAL CONSENT, then slouch about the kitchen for a scandalously prolonged breakfast. Mo looks at me, sleepy-eyed with satisfaction, over a bare plate. “I needed that.” A guilty glance across at the empty egg carton by the frying pan on the hob: “My waistline disagrees, but my stomach says ‘fuck it.’”

“Enjoy it while you can.” I’ve got plans for the weekend that include blowing a week’s salary on stuff we might not need: brown rice, lentils, canned beans, camping gas cylinders. I can make room for it in our abbreviated joke of a cellar if I toss the rusting bicycle and a bunch of other crap that’s taking up space . . . “I was thinking about going into the office this afternoon.”

“But you’re signed off sick,” Mo points out.

“Yeah, that’s the trouble.” I refill my coffee mug from the cafetière.

“After what Andy said, I figure I ought to at least poke around Angleton’s office. See if I can spot something that everyone else has missed, before the trail goes cold. And there are some files I want to pull so I’ve got something to read over the weekend.”

“You are not bringing work home.” She crosses her arms, abruptly mulish.

“The thought never crossed my mind.” I play the innocent expression card and she raises me one sullen glare. I fold. “I’m sorry, but there’s also some reading matter I want to pick up.”

“You’re not bringing work home! We’re not certified, anyway.”

“Yes we are—as of yesterday, this is a level two secure site,” I point out. “I’m not bringing anything secret home, just archive stuff from the stacks. It’s tagged ‘confidential’ but it’s so old it’s nearly ready to claim its pension. Strictly historical interest only.”

“Um.” She raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Angleton”—I swallow—“when he sent me to Cosford he forgot to give me the backgrounder first. But he gave me a reading list.”

“Oh fucking hell.” She looks annoyed, which is a good sign. But then her eyes track sideways and I realize I’m not off the hook yet. “What’s that?”

“That?” I ask brightly, suppressing the impulse to squawk oh shit. “It appears to be a cardboard box.”

“A cardboard box with a picture of an iPhone on it,” she says slowly.

“It’s empty,” I hurry to reassure her.

“Right.” She picks up her coffee and takes a mouthful. “Would I be right in thinking it’s empty because it used to contain an iPhone? Which is now, oh, I dunno, in your pocket?”

“Um. Yes.”

“Oh, Bob. Don’t you know any better?”

“It was at least a class four glamour,” I say defensively, resisting the urge to hunch my shoulders and hiss preciousss. “And I needed a new phone anyway.”

She sighs. “Why, Bob? Has your old phone started to smell or something?”

“I left my PDA in Hangar Six at Cosford,” I point out. “It’s slightly scorched around the edges and I don’t have room for half my contacts on my mobile.”

“So you bought an iPhone, rather than bugging Iris to sign off on a replacement PDA.”

“If you must put it that way . . . yes.”

Mo rolls her eyes. “Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of −5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card—just how much did it cost? Will you take it back if I guilt-trip you hard enough? Do pigs fly?”

“I was considering it,” I admit. “But then Brains came round and installed something.”

“Brains installed—”

“He’s working on a port of OFCUT to the iPhone platform at work. I think he thought mine was an official phone . . . I’ve got to take it into the office and get it scrubbed before I even think about trading it in, or the Auditors will string us both up by the giblets.” I shudder faintly, but Mo is visibly distracted.

“Hang on. They’ve ported OFCUT to the iPhone? What does it look like?”

“I’ll show you . . .”

Fifteen minutes later I am on my way to the office, sans shiny. Mo is still sitting at the kitchen table with a cold mug of coffee, in thrall to the JesusPhone’s reality distortion field, prodding at the jelly-bean icons with an expression of hapless fascination on her face. I’ve got a horrible feeling that the only way I’m going to earn forgiveness is to buy her one for her birthday. Such is life, in a geek household.

ACTUALLY, I HAVE A MOTIVE FOR GOING IN TO WORK THAT I don’t feel like telling Mo about.

So as soon as I’ve stopped in my office and filled out a requisition for the file numbers Angleton scribbled on that scrap of paper for me—we can’t get at the stacks directly right now, they’re fifty meters down under the building site that is Service House, but there’s a twice-daily collection and delivery run—I head down the corridor and across the walkway and up the stairs to the Security Office.

“Is Harry in?” I ask the guy in the blue suit behind the counter. He’s reading the afternoon Metro and looking bored.

“Harry? Who wants to know?” He sits up.

I pull my warrant card. “Bob Howard, on active. I want to talk to Harry—or failing that, whoever the issuing officer is—about personal defense options.”

“Personal def—” He peers at my warrant card: then his eyes uncross and he undergoes a sudden attitude adjustment. “Oh, you’re one of them. Right. You wait here, sir, we’ll get you sorted out.”

Contrary to popular fiction, there is no such thing as a “license to kill.” Nor do secret agents routinely carry firearms for self-defense. Me, I don’t even like guns—I mean, they’re great fun if all you want to do is make holes in paper targets at a firing range, but for their real design purpose, saving your ass in a life-or-death emergency, no: that’s not on my list of fun things. I’ve been trained not to shoot my own foot off (and I’ve been practicing regularly, ever since the business on Saint Martin), but I feel a lot safer when I’m not carrying a gun.

However, two days ago my primary defensive ward got smoked in a civilian FATACC, yesterday I got doorstepped by a killer zombie from Dzerzhinsky Square, and I now have a dull ache in the life insurance policy telling me that it’s time to tool up. Which in my case means, basically, dropping in on Harry, which means—

“Bob, my son! And how’s it going with you? Girlfriend glassed your head up?”

Harry the Horse is our departmental armorer. He looks like an extra from The Long Good Friday: belt-straining paunch that’s constantly trying to escape, thinning white hair, and a piratical black eye-patch. Last time I saw him he was explaining the finer details of the care and feeding of a Glock 17 (which we’ve standardized on, damn it, because of an ill-thought requirement for ammunition and parts commonality with the Sweeney); I responded by showing him how to take down a medusa (something which I have unfortunately too much experience at).

I recover from the back-slapping and straighten up: “It’s going well, Harry. Well, kinda-sorta. My ward got smoked a couple of days ago and I’m on heightened alert—there’s been an incident—”

“—As I can see from your head, my son, so you’re thinking you need to armor up. Come right this way, let’s see what we can kit you out with.” He yanks the inner door open and pulls me into his little shop of—

You know that scene in The Matrix? When Neo says: “We need guns,” and the white backdrop turns into a cross between Heathrow Airport and the back room at a rifle range? Harry’s temporary office in the New Annexe Third Floor Extension Security Area is a bit like that, only cramped and lit by a bare sixty-watt incandescent bulb supervised by a small and very sleepy spider.

Harry pulls something that looks like an M16 on steroids off the wall and picks up a drum magazine the size of a small car tire. “Can I interest you in an Atchisson AA-12 assault shotgun? Burst-selectable for single shot or full auto? Takes a twenty-round drum full of twelve-gauge magnum rounds, and I’ve got a special load-out just for taking down paranormal manifestations—alternate FRAG-12 fin-stabilized grenades, white phosphorus rounds, and solid silver triple-ought buck, each ball micro-engraved with the Litany of Khar-Nesh—right up your street, my son.” He racks the slide on the AA-12 with a clattering clash like the latch on the gates of hell.

“Er, I was thinking of something a little smaller, perhaps? Something I could carry concealed without looking like I was smuggling antitank guns on the bus?”

“Wimp.” Harry puts the AA-12 back on the rack and carefully stows the drum magazine in a drawer. I can tell he’s proud of his new toy, which from the sound of it would certainly blast any unwanted visitor right off my doorstep—and the front path, and the pavement, and the neighbors opposite at number 27, and their back garden too. “So tell me, what is it you really want?”

That’s the cue for business: “First, I need to indent for a new class four- certified defensive ward, personal, safe to wear 24x7.” I pause. “I also want to draw a HOG, cat three with silvered base and a suitable carrier. And—” I steel myself: “I’ll take your advice on the next, but I was thinking about drawing a personal protective firearm—I’m certificated on the Glock—and a box of ammunition. I won’t be routinely carrying it, but it’ll be kept at home to repel boarders.”

“You don’t need a Glock to get rid of lodgers, my son.” He spots my expression. “Had a problem?”

“Yeah, attempted physical intrusion.”

“Hmm. Who else will have access to the weapon?”

I choose my next words carefully: “The house is a level two secure site. The only other resident is my wife. Dr. O’Brien isn’t certificated for firearms, but she has other competencies and knows not to play with other kids’ toys.”

Harry considers his next words carefully: “I don’t want to lean on you, Bob, but I need more than your word for that. Seeing as how it’s for you and the delectable Dominique—give her my regards—I think we can bend the rules far enough to fit, but I shall need to put a ward on the trigger guard.”

“A—How?” That’s new to me.

“It’s a new technique the eggheads in Q-Projects have come up with: they take a drop of your blood and key the trigger guard so that the only finger that’ll fit through it is yours. Of course,” his voice drops confidingly, “that doesn’t stop the bad guys from chopping your finger off and using it to work the trigger; but they’ve got to take the gun and the finger off you before they can shoot you with it. Let’s just say, it’s more about stopping pistols from going walkies in public than about stopping your lady wife from offing you in a fit of jealous passion.”

I roll my eyes. “Okay, I can live with that.”

He brightens: “Also, we can make it invisible, and silent.”

“Wha—hey! You mean you’ve got real concealed carry?”

He winks at me.

“Okay, I would like that, too. Um. As long as it’s not invisible to me, also. And, um, the holster. An invisible gun in a visible holster would be kind of inconvenient . . .”

“It’ll be invisible to anyone who doesn’t have a warrant card, my son, or your money back.”

“Will you match my life insurance, if it isn’t and some bright spark sets an SO19 team on me?” (One of the reasons I am reluctant to carry a handgun in public is that the London Metropolitan Police have a zero-tolerance approach to anyone else carrying guns, and while their specialist firearms teams don’t officially have a shoot-to-kill policy, you try finding a Brazilian plumber who does call-out work during a bomb scare these days.)

“I think we can back that, yes.” Harry sounds amused. “Is that your lot?”

“It’ll do.” A new ward for myself, a Hand of Glory if I need to make a quick strategic withdrawal, and a gun to keep at home that I can carry in public if I absolutely have to: What more could an extremely worried spook ask for? Ah, I know. “Do you have any alarms?” I ask.

“I thought you was dead-set on home defense the DIY way.” Harry looks momentarily scornful, then thoughtful: “Things ain’t that bad yet, are they?”

“Could be.” I shove my hands deep in my pockets and do my best to look gloomy. “Could be.”

“Whoa.” Harry’s forehead wrinkles further. “Listen. There could be a problem: you drawing a HOG and a gun, and your good lady wife’s violin, that makes you a regular arsenal, dunnit? Now, if I was signing out an alarm to, oh, that nice Mrs. Thompson in Human Resources”—I shudder—“there’d be no problem, on account of how she and her hubby and that no-good son of theirs ain’t certificated for combat and wouldn’t know a receiver from a slide if they trapped their fingers between them. Right? But let me just put it to you: suppose I sign an alarm out to you, put you and your missus on the watch list, and a bad guy comes calling at your front door. You and Dr. O’Brien go to the mattresses, and you activate the alarm, and being you and the missus you give as good as you get. Thirty seconds later the Watch Team are on your case and zoom in. Heat of battle, heat of battle: How do the Watch Team know that the people shooting from inside your house are you and your wife? What if you’ve gotten out through the back window? That’s how blue-on-blue happens, my son. I figure you ought to think this one through some more.”

“Okay.” I look around the compact armory. “Guess you’re right.”

We’ve got a panic button, it’s part of the kit the Plumbers fitted us out with; but an alarm of the kind I’m talking about is portable, personal, you carry it on your body and there’s a limited list of folks who carry them—that kind of cover is computationally expensive—and if you’re on the watch list and you trigger the alarm, SCORPION STARE wakes up and starts looking for you. And for everyone who might be threatening you. You don’t want to press that button by accident, believe me.

“One ward, one HOG, and a +2 magic pistol of invisible smiting. Anything else I need to know?”

“Yeah. Come back in an hour and I’ll have all the paperwork waiting for you to sign. The HOG and the ward I can give you once I get your chop; the pistol will take a little longer.” Harry shrugs. “Best I can do, awright?”

“You’re a champ.” I make my good-byes, then head off. I’ve got other things to do before I go home.

I’M ON MY WAY TO ANDY’S OFFICE WHEN IRIS RUNS ME down.

“Bob! What are you doing here? I thought I told you to take the week off?” She sounds mildly irritated, and a little out of breath, as if she’s been running around looking for me. “Hey, what happened to your head?”

I shrug. “Stuff came up.”

She looks concerned. “In my office.”

I demur: her office is her territory. “Look, Mo came back from . . . a job . . . in pieces, really rattled. Then the job followed her home, and that’s a full-dress panic—”

Her eyes narrow: “How bad?”

“This bad.” I point to the row of butterfly closures on my head and she winces. “Have you heard anything about—about upswings in non-affiliated agency activity in London this week?”

“My office,” she says, very firmly, and this time she means it.

“Okay.”

Once inside her office, she locks the door, switches on the red DND lamp, then lowers the blinds on the glass window that lets her view the corridor. Then she turns to me. “What codewords do you know?”

“I’ve been approved for CLUB ZERO”—she gives a sharp intake of breath—“and CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Not to mention MAGINOT BLUE STARS, but Harry the Horse wouldn’t give me an alarm buzzer without your chop on the order form. And Angleton just told me to deputize for him on BLOODY BARON, although I haven’t been briefed on that yet.”

“Wow. That’s a bundle.” She eyes me warily. “Angleton dumps a lot on your shoulders.” For someone so junior, she leaves unsaid.

“Yes.” I focus on her more closely: wavy chestnut hair that is currently unkempt and beginning to show silvery roots, crow’s-foot worry lines at the edges of her eyes, a restlessness to her stance that suggests she’s far busier than she wants me to see. “Your turn.”

“Wait, first—what happened yesterday?”

“Andy was with the Plumbers on cleanup; it should be on today’s overnight events briefing sheet.”

“That was”—her eyes widen—“you? Active incursion and assault by a class three, repelled by agents? Those stitches, it was that?”

“Yeah.” I flop down on her visitor’s chair without a by-your-leave.

“They tried to rearrange my features: it was a close call. I came in today to draw a personal defense item, but also to ask what the hell is going on? And this business about Angleton—”

“You saw him the day before yesterday.”

“Yes.” I pause. “He’s still missing. Right?”

She nods.

“Do you want me to look round his office? In case he left anything?” Iris sniffs. “No.” I think she’s a poor liar. “But if you know anything . . . ?”

“I don’t like being kept in the dark.” Coming over all snippy on the person who is my nominal manager isn’t clever, I know, but at this point I’m running low on self-restraint. “It seems to me that a whole bunch of rather bad things are happening right now, and that smells to me like enemy action.” I’m echoing Andy. “Whoever the enemy is, in this context. Right, fine, you keep on playing games, that’s all right by me—except that it isn’t, really, because one of the games in question just followed my wife home and tried to kill her. Us.” I point to the row of butterfly sutures on my forehead, and to her credit, she winces. “Remember, it costs.”

“You’ve made your point,” she says quietly, sitting down behind her desk. “Bob, if it was just up to me, I’d tell you—but it isn’t. There’s a committee meeting tomorrow, though, and I’ll raise your concerns. Ask me again on Monday and I should be able to pull you in on the BLOODY BARON committee, and at least add you to the briefing list for CLUB ZERO. In the meantime, if you don’t mind me asking—what items did Harry sign out to you?”

“He’s processing them now.” I enumerate. “We’ve also had our household security upgraded, in case there’s a repeat visit, although I think that’s unlikely. We’re alerted now, so I’d expect any follow-ups to happen out in public: it’s riskier for them than it was, but right now the house is a kill zone so if they want Mo badly enough they’ll have to do it in the street.”

“Ouch.” She leans back in her chair and rests one hand on her computer keyboard. “Listen. If you’re really sure you want an alarm, I’ll sign for one. But . . . what Harry said? Listen to him. It’s not necessarily what you need. The gun—well, you’re certified. Certificated.” She gives a moue of annoyance at the mangled language we have to use: “Whatever. Just keep it out of sight of the public and don’t lose track of it. As for the rest—”

She exhales: “There has been an uptick in meetings in public places conducted by three junior attachés at the Russian embassy who our esteemed colleagues in the Dustbin”—she means the Security Service, popularly but incorrectly known as MI5—“have been keeping track of for some time. It’s hard to be sure just which organization any given diplomat with covert connections is working for, but they initially thought these guys were FSB controllers. However, we’ve had recent indications that they’re actually working for someone else—the Thirteenth Directorate, probably. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, but they seem to be looking for something, or someone.”

“And then there was the Amsterdam business,” I prod.

Another sharp look: “You weren’t cleared for that.”

“Andy procured a Letter of Release for Mo.” I stare right back at her, bluffing. The I’ll tell you my secrets if you tell me yours tap dance is a tedious occupational hazard in this line of work.

“Well, yes, then.” The bluff works—that, and her ward told her I’m telling the truth about the Letter of Release. “Amsterdam, CLUB ZERO, was indirectly connected.”

“So we’ve got an upswing of activity in the Netherlands and the UK—elsewhere in Europe, too?” I speculate: “Remember I’ve sat in on my share of joint liaison meetings?”

“I can’t comment further until after the steering group meeting tomorrow.” And my bluff falls apart: “I’ve told you everything I can tell you without official sanction, Bob. Get your kit sorted out, clear down your chores, and go home for the weekend. That’s an order! I’ll talk to you on Monday. Hopefully the news will be better by then . . .”