Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

“Guys.” Jonquil sounds tense. “We don’t have time for this-”

I lie there, trying to be invisible, hoping Gareth is as stupid as he seems.

“It must have an off button somewhere,” Julian mumbles. “Shiny…”

“Mine!” Gareth clutches it possessively. The earbuds are wrapped around his hand, convolvulus climbing.

Jonquil clears her throat: “If you can’t switch it off, leave it behind. It’s time to go. Now.”

“Bah.” Julian shakes himself and steps back. Bastard, I think. “Put it down, Gareth-”

“Mine!” Gareth squeaks, and plugs the earbuds into his head as his thumb is inexorably dragged to the NecronomiPod’s home button.

“Stop him-” Jonquil is too late, and she and Julian are clearly not B-Team members in my eyes because she steps behind Julian as he grabs up his shotgun and brings it to bear on Gareth-

Who is limned in black, dancing to a different beat as the writhing white wires drill deep into his consciousness through the shortest possible path, drilling and eating and consuming the unauthorized intruder who has had the temerity to plug himself into a device running a Laundry countermeasure suite-

And he’s jitterbugging across the floor, a shadowy silhouette of his former self twitching as if he’s plugged into a live wire. It only lasts for a couple of seconds, then the ’Pod finishes discharging its lethal load through his brain and Gareth’s body drops to the floor, crashing across my legs like a dead weight.

The white earbuds roll away from his corpse, satiated and somehow fat.

“You bastard-” Julian is across the room and the shotgun muzzle is a subway tunnel filling my right eye.

“Stop!”

Julian takes a deep, shuddering breath. The gun doesn’t waver.

“Gareth fucked up,” Jonquil says shakily.

“Don’t care. He’s got to die.” I can see a snarl building in Julian’s chest, sense the tension in the set of his jaw. I’ve stopped breathing: if I move-

“Gareth failed the All-Highest.” Jonquil is standing behind Julian now. “He was weak. He surrendered to a naff little glamour. Are you going to surrender to a stupid impulse, Julian? Are you weak? Do you want to hear what All-Highest will say if you damage the vessel?”

For a moment Julian does nothing-then he breathes out. “No.” He squints at me along the barrel of his gun. “You’re going to die, meat. And I’m going to watch you go.” The shotgun swings away suddenly, pointing at the floor.

“What are we going to do with that?” he asks Jonquil, gesturing sideways at Gareth’s body.

“Drag it downstairs and stack it with the others.” She shrugs dismissively.

“The vessel’s phone-”

“This for his phone.” She kicks the NecronomiPod; it caroms off the wall and skids beneath the chest of drawers. “Gareth’s safe to touch now. Get him downstairs.”

“How are you going to move the prisoner?”

“I’m sure he can walk.” Jonquil rests a hand on my right shoulder. I shudder. “You can walk, can’t you, Mr. Howard? Please say you can walk? Because if you can’t-” She moves her hand a couple of centimeters down my arm and squeezes.

“I can walk!” I yelp, gasping for breath. “Let me… up…”

Julian grabs me under the left armpit-the undamaged one-and heaves me to my knees. I try to get my feet under me, and everything goes gray for a few seconds, but I don’t faint. I’m just gasping for breath and dizzy, and a bit nauseous, and my right arm feels awful.

“That’s good,” says Jonquil, taking my right elbow as Julian lets go and bends down to pick up their phone-fiddling former friend. “Now you’re just going to step this way, Mr. Howard, and then you’re going to follow Julian downstairs and get in the back of the car and sit quietly, aren’t you?”

I nod. Bastard Goatfuckers. If they think a blood-soaked man with his arms handcuffed behind his back won’t draw attention in the average London suburban street-

Shit, I think despairingly as I reach the bottom of the staircase and Julian opens a side door onto a garage, for B-Team cultists these two have really got their shit together. Jonquil opens the rear door of the silver Mercedes saloon and Julian grunts as he slides Gareth’s body onto the passenger seat and positions the corpse so that it looks like it’s sleeping. Then he opens the boot of the silver Mercedes saloon and pushes me into it headfirst, so that I land on my right arm in a blaze of agony. And that’s the last clear thought I think for a while.

PUTNEY HIGH STREET, ABOUT FIFTEEN KILOMETERS SOUTHWEST of the center of the capital, is a bustling shopping and retail area, humming with shops and pubs and other civic amenities: the rail and tube stations, the local magistrate’s court, fire stations. Leafy tree-lined roads curl away behind the high street, host to uncountable thousands of houses and maisonettes, every curb crammed with the parked cars of commuter-land.

Right now it’s early evening. A fire-control truck-bulky and red, its load bed occupied by a boxy control room-is drawn up on the drive-through parking area of the court, its nearside wheels on the pavement, blue lights strobing. A couple of police cars wait nearby, ready to clear the way if the truck starts to roll.

Despite appearances, it isn’t really a fire-control truck: it’s owned by OCCULUS-Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations-that branch of the military that my employers call in when a situation, to use Angleton’s ladder of apocalypse, escalates above Rung One. And right now, its occupants are doing what soldiers frequently do best: waiting for a call.

A short, wiry fellow with horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a tweed jacket with patched elbows over a green wool sweater, lounges in an office seat in front of a desk with a laptop and a bunch of communications gear bolted to it. He’s prematurely balding-he isn’t forty yet-and his skin is slightly translucent, as if aged beyond his years. There’s an olive-green telephone handset jammed between his shoulder and his right ear, and he’s twiddling his fingers impatiently as he waits on the line.

“Yes? Yes?” he demands busily.

“Connecting you now, sir…” More static. The handset doesn’t lead to a phone, mobile or otherwise, but to a TETRA terminal dedicated to OCCULUS’s use: an early nineties digital radio technology, horribly obsolete, but one that the government has been locked into by a thirty-year contract. “Dr. Angleton is on the line.”

“Ah, James! Are you there?”

“Major Barnes?”

“Yes, it’s me! Any word on our boy?”

“We can find him.” Angleton’s voice is clear. Barnes sits up unconsciously expectant.

Farther back in the OCCULUS truck, a man wearing a bright yellow HAZMAT suit glances up from the H &K MP5 he’s checking for the third time. Another HAZMAT-suited soldier, shorter and stockier, knuckles him in the back. “Hey, Scary, nobody ever tell you it’s rude to eavesdrop?”

“Sorry, sir.”

Major Barnes ignores them: Angleton is talking. “I have a preliminary fix and I’m on my way over right now. I should be with you in about five minutes. Once I’m on location I can guide you to the target in person.”

“Are you sure that’s advisable?”

“No, but I’ll leave tactical command up to you; the problem is, I don’t have an exact fix to within less than a hundred meters. I need to be on the spot.”

Major Barnes swears silently. “All right, we’ll have to work with that. What exactly do you think we’re facing?”

“No idea,” Angleton says cheerfully, “but whatever we’re looking at, it’s been set up by a cell of the Black Brethren. If we’re lucky it’ll prove to be a safe house with just a couple of residents. If not… remember the Scouts’ motto?”