Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Фантастика и фэнтези, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Fuller Memorandum: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Fuller Memorandum»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Bob has been behind a desk for too long, busy indexing and archiving the Laundry's secret files, and he's longing for a break when his wife, Mo, announces that she's landed a teaching assignment at a staff college in Cambridge. And he's worrying at the problem of a missing manuscript – an unfinished policy document found in the personal effects of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller (rtd) after his death – which is absent from the Laundry archives. (Fuller was not only the tactician who first invented Blitzkrieg warfare in 1917-18; he was also #2 to Aleister Crowley in the OTO, and a heavyweight Cabalist.) So Bob follows Mo to Cambridge, and is startled to find a Russian spy sneaking around after him. The Fuller Memorandum is missing, and the FSB want it badly. It's got something to do with Fuller's occult obsessions, and something to do with the Laundry's creation in 1941. But Bob doesn't realize just how much is at stake until someone tries to kill Mo, and his boss Angleton starts behaving oddly before lapsing into a coma. The theft of Fuller's document is at the heart of a murderous conspiracy rooted in the GULAGs, and Bob is dumped into a deadly race against time – because if he can't work out where it's been hidden, and how it's connected to Angleton's mysterious illness, it's going to be curtains for the Laundry (and possibly the world) as the cultists of Chernobog try to raise darkness at noon.

The Fuller Memorandum — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Fuller Memorandum», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

“Yes, you can be absolutely certain of that.”

He turns back to the door and fumbles with his key ring. Which is why he doesn’t see her withdraw a silenced pistol from her bag, raise it to the back of his head, and discharge a single round into his cerebellum. The gun makes little sound-just the racking click of its action-but as she fires, the suppressor fitted to its muzzle frosts over with clear fluid, air in contact with it liquefying as it chills to just above absolute zero. Mr. Dower slumps forward against the door. The woman’s arm follows him down with absolute precision and discharges a second round into the top of his skull, but it is unnecessary: he is already dead.

She looks around with green eyes as deep as sacrificial cenotes, eyes in which a sensitive witness might see luminous worms writhing. But there are no sensitive witnesses to see through the glamour: just the ordinary post-work crowd hurrying about their business on the London streets. For a moment her face shimmers, the facade sliding-her attention is strained, flying in too many directions to maintain the illusion effectively-but then she notices and pulls herself together. She returns the chilly pistol to her bag. Then, turning on one spiked heel, she strides away from the corpse: just another professional woman on her way home from the office. Nobody has witnessed the killing, and it will be twenty minutes before a passing policeman realizes that the drunk sleeping in the doorway is never going to rise again.

7. BEER AND TEA

The Fuller Memorandum - изображение 10

YOU CAN FOCUS ON THINKING YOURSELF INTO THE OTHER guy’s shoes until the cows come home, but it’s not going to do you a whole lot of good if he’s actually wearing sandals. More to the point, what if he’s got an entire shoe rack to choose from, and the pair you need is the one that’s missing? There is a chicken-and-egg problem here, or more accurately a sole-and-bootstrap one, and I’m not going to solve it by sitting in my office. Nor am I going to fix matters by hollering down the speaking tube at the gnomes buried in the stacks, not with just two delivery runs a day.

On the other hand, if you go and actually look at the other guy’s footprints you might just find something new. And so, in a spirit of enquiry, I set out to burgle Angleton’s office.

Now, it just so happens that Angleton has officially been declared missing. And I am his assistant trainee tea-boy. In a more paranoid working environment I might just be under suspicion of having disappeared him myself: perish the thought and pass the ammunition. But Angleton is reckoned to be sufficiently formidable that… well, let’s say it’s unlikely. Besides, we don’t generally play politics with the kid gloves off. (There are exceptions, such as the late and unlamented Bridget; but they’re exactly that: exceptions. The hard fact is that all the real players can turn the game board into a smoking hole in the map. Which generally forces them to tread lightly.)

Skulking past Iris’s office window, I tiptoe around the coffee station and duck down the back staircase, through the fire doors, round the bend, down the fire escape stairs, and then pause outside the unmarked green metal door. I do not encounter anyone in the process, but you can never be sure-there are cameras, and there is Internal Security, and if you’re really unlucky there are the caretakers from the night shift. This is a security agency after all. However slipshod and dustily eccentric it might appear at times, you should never take things for granted if you are perpetrating monkey business.

I pull out the NecronomiPod and fire it up. Happy fun icons glow at me: Safari, YouTube, Horned Skull, Settings, Bloody Runes, Messaging, Elder Sign, you know the interface. Bloody Runes gets me into the ward detector, which is showing the usual options. I point the camera at the door and peer into the shiny screen. Sure enough, in addition to Angleton’s trademark Screaming Mind someone has ploddingly inscribed a Langford Death Parrot, with a sympathetic link to a web stats counter so they can monitor how many intruders it’s headcrashed from the comfort of their laptop. Tch, what are standards coming to? I pause as a nasty thought strikes me and I triple-check the door frame, then the ceiling above the entrance, then the other side of the corridor, just in case-but no, nothing. This is strictly amateur hour stuff, so rather than zapping the LDP I pull out my conductive pencil and sketch in a breakpoint and then an exception list with a single item: the signature of my new ward. The Screaming Mind already knows me well. Three minutes later I put the phone away, place my hand on the doorknob, twist and push.

Angleton’s office: here be monsters. Silent and cold, it is home to the ghosts of a war colder by far than the one the ignorant public thought we won in 1989-a room walled in floor-to-ceiling file drawers, a gunmetal desk with organ-pedals and teletype keyboard, dominated by a hooded microfiche reader-the silent heart of an intelligence stilled, no longer beating out the number station signals across the Iron Curtain. I half-expect to see cobwebs in the corners, to smell the stale cigarette ash of a thousand tense nights beneath the arctic skies, waiting for the bombers.

I shake myself. History lies thick as winter snow in this room: I could drown beneath its avalanche weight if I don’t pull myself together. And in any case, Angleton was here-in his office I mean, not in this actual spot-before the cold war. I’ve seen a photograph from 1942, the man himself smiling at the camera, visibly no older (or younger) than he is today. It’s an open question, the extent to which he was involved in the occult affairs of government before the Second World War. Just how far back does he go? Human Resources don’t have a home address on file, which is itself suggestive. I wonder…

Before I sit down behind his desk, I scan the walls, floor, and ceiling up and down with the NecronomiPod. Sure enough, certain of the file drawers are booby-trapped with lethal-looking webworks of magic-not drawn in the plodding journeyman hand of the outer door’s vandal, but sketched in Angleton’s spidery scrawl, complex arcs and symbols linking arcane declarations and gruesome probability matrices. I could reverse engineer them in time and maybe worm my way inside, but knowing the boss there’s probably nothing there but nitrogen triiodide on the drawer rails and a jack-in-the-box loaded with tear gas: he was a firm believer in keeping the crown jewels in his head-or its annex, the thing in the green metal desk.

The Memex…

You’ve got to understand that although I’ve read about the things, I’ve never actually used one. It’s an important piece of the history of computing, leaked to the public as a think-piece commissioned by the Atlantic Weekly in 1945; most of the readers thought it was a gosh-wow-by-damn good idea, but were unlikely to realize that a number of the things had actually been built, using a slush fund earmarked for the Manhattan Project. The product of electromechanical engineering at its finest, not to mention its most horrendously complex, each Memex cost as much as a B-29 bomber-and contained six times as many moving parts, most of them assembled by watchmakers. It wasn’t until HyperCard showed up on the Apple Mac in 1987 that anything like it reached the general public.

I believe Angleton’s Memex is the only one that is still working, much less in day-to-day use, and to say it takes black magic to keep it running would be no exaggeration. I approach the seat with considerable caution, and not just because I’m absolutely certain he will have taken steps to ensure that anyone who sits in it without his approval and pushes the big red on button will never push another button in their (admittedly short) life; he knows how to use the thing, but if I crash it or break the cylinder head gasket or something and he comes back, the only shoes I’d be safe in would be a pair of NASA-issue moon boots (and maybe not even then).

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Fuller Memorandum»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Fuller Memorandum» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Charles Stross - Glasshouse
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - Rule 34
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - Equoid
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - The Jennifer Morgue
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - Szklany dom
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - The Revolution Business
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - The Clan Corporate
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - The Family Trade
Charles Stross
Charles Stross - The Hidden Family
Charles Stross
libcat.ru: книга без обложки
Charles Stross
Отзывы о книге «The Fuller Memorandum»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Fuller Memorandum» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x