Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

My forehead’s damp and I feel sick. I reach out to push myself up so I can shut the front door in case a curious neighbor sees something that might damage their house valuation, and my vision blurs again. I try to wipe my face and my hand comes away red and sticky. That’s odd, I tell myself, I’ve never been shot before. Then everything gets very hazy and far away for a while.

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…”