Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

After she put the smelling salts away and I managed to sit up I confessed that yes, there were one or two things that needed minor adjustment. And-who knew?-the trivial annoyances fucked right off shortly thereafter.

Iris couldn’t do anything about my biggest headaches-as Angleton’s secretary, I get to carry his cans all the time-but she even managed to make him ease up a little in April, when I was overbooked for two simultaneous liaison committee meetings (one in London, one in Belgium) and he wanted me to go digging in the stacks for a file so vitally important that it had last been seen in the mid-1950s, slightly chewed on by mice.

I don’t know where in hell they found her, but as managers go she’s all I can ask for. I don’t know much about her home life-some Laundry staff socialize after work, others just don’t, and I guess she’s one of the compartmentalized kind-but she seems like the type of manager who learned her people skills in the process of steering a big, unruly family around, rather than in business school. The iron whim is tempered with patience, and she’s a better shoulder to cry on than any member of the clergy I’ve ever met. People who work for her actually want to make her happy.

Which goes some way towards explaining, I hope, what happened later-and why, when Iris ordered me to scram, I hurried to obey.

But not what I did on my way out of the office.

ANGLETON’S OFFICE IS DOWN A STAIRCASE AND ROUND A bend, in a windowless cul-de-sac that I’ll swear occupies the fitting rooms at the back of the M &S opposite C &A-I’ve never been able to make the geometry of this building line up. But that’s not surprising.

When the rest of us upped sticks and moved to the New Annexe two years ago (to make way for redevelopment of the old Service House site under some kind of public-private partnership deal), there was much headless-chicken emulation, and many committee meetings, and probably several stress-induced heart attacks due to the complexity of the relocation. Angleton didn’t show up to any of the planning meetings, ignored the memos and pre-uplift checklists and questionnaires, and cut the woman from Logistics and Relocation dead when she tried to shoulder-barge his office. But when we got to the end of it, what do you know? His office was at the bottom of the rear stairwell in the New Annexe, just as if it had always been there, green enameled metal door and all.

I could easily go home without passing his door, but I don’t. Now that the worst has come to pass, a gloomy curiosity has me in its grip. Why did he want me to go to Cosford? What was that guff about a white elephant? It’ll bug me for the rest of the week if I don’t ask the old coffin-dodger, and Iris told me to go home and relax. So I curve past the crypt on my way to the lich-gate, so to speak, and steel myself to beard the monster in his den.

(See, I’m calling him rude names. That’s to prove to myself that I’m not scared of him like everybody else. See? I’m not terrified!)

The dark green metal door’s shut when I come to it. But the red security light isn’t on, so I knock. “Boss?” I ask softly.

I hear a muffled noise, as of something very large and massive shuffling around in a confined space. Then there’s a grunt, and a heavy thud. I rest my palm lightly on the pitted brass door handle. “Boss?” I repeat.

Heavy breathing. “Enter.”

I push the door open, with trepidation.

Angleton’s office feels like it’s the size of a self-respecting broom closet, even though it’s actually quite large. All four walls are shelved floor-to-ceiling in ledgers-not books, but binders full of microfiche cards. In the middle of the room sits his legendary desk, an olive-drab monolith that looks like it came out of a Second World War aircraft carrier; a monstrous hump like a 1950s TV set sits on top of it, like a microfiche reader. Except that it isn’t. Microfiche readers don’t come with organ pedals and hoppers to gulp down mountains of cards. Angleton’s desk is a genuine Memex, the only one I’ve seen outside of the National Cryptologic Museum run by the NSA in Maryland.

To those who don’t need to know, Angleton is just a dry old guy who rides herd on the filing cabinets in Arcana Analysis and does stuff for the Counter-Possession Unit. His job title is Detached Special Secretary, which doesn’t mean what you think it means: scuttlebutt is that it’s short for Deeply Scary Sorcerer.

He’s nearly bald, his chin is two sizes two small for his skull, and his domed scalp gleams like bone: with his wizened mannerisms-like a public school master from the 1930s, Mr. Chips redux-people tend to underestimate him on first acquaintance. It’s a mistake they only make once. Whether or not they survive.

“Ah, Robert.” He looks up from the Memex screen, his face stained pale blue by its illumination. “Please be seated.”

I sit down. The chair, a relic of the cold war, squeaks angrily. “I fucked up.”

“Hold it for a minute, please.” He peers at something on the screen again, twisting a couple of dials and adjusting a vernier scale. Then he lifts a hinged lid covering the front of the Memex and begins to type rapidly on a stenographer’s keyboard. Paper tape spools out and over into a slot behind the keyboard. He inspects it for a moment, then reaches over to a panel and pulls out two organ stops. There’s a bright flash and a click, and he closes the lid over the keyboard with a look of satisfaction. “Saved.”

(The Memex is an electromechanical hypertext machine, running on microfiche: it’s fiddly, slow, lacks storage capacity, and needs a lot of maintenance. I once asked him why he stuck with it; he grunted something about Van Eck radiation and changed the subject.)

“Now, Robert. What did you think of the elephant?”

“Never got to see it.” I shake my head. “I said I-”

“Oh dear.” Angleton looks mildly irritated: I shiver.

“That’s what I came to tell you; I’ve just finished filing an R60 and Iris told me to sign off sick for the week. I killed a bystander by accident. It’s a real fuck-up.”

“So you didn’t see the white elephant.”

I do a double take. “Boss? Hello? Major FATACC incident while carrying out the primary assignment! What’s so important about a museum piece?”

“Harrumph.” He reaches out and flicks a switch: the Memex screen goes dark. “I thought it was high past time you were briefed on the Squadron.”

“The Squadron? That would be 666 Squadron RAF, right? I looked them up on the web-they were deactivated in 1964, weren’t they?”

Angleton’s thin smile tells me exactly what he thinks of the world wide web.

“Not exactly. They were just redeployed in support of a higher mission.”

I remember the blue-glowing instrument panel lighting up the hangar from behind canvas screens, and shudder. “What kind of…?”

“They’re part of the contingency planning for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, boy.” He looks momentarily annoyed, as if the impending end of the world as we know it is a minor inconvenience. “Bystanders,” he murmurs: “Whatever will they think of next?”

“The white elephant,” I prompt, but I’m too late.

“Never mind that now, boy, you can go back and look at it later.” He looks at me, concern and irritation wrinkling his face further, and this time he’s actually looking, studying me with those merciless washed-out eyes as if I’m a sample on a dissection tray: “Hmm. If Iris told you to take the rest of the week off, I suppose you ought to do as she says. A bystander, eh? What was a bystander doing there?”

“She was a volunteer at the museum-she was bringing us tea.”

Angleton’s eyes narrow. “Was she indeed?” He picks up a pen and a pad and scrawls a list of numbers on it. “Well, when you feel like getting back to work, you might want to go down to the stacks and retrieve these documents from the dead file store. I think you’ll find them very interesting.” He signs the note and slides it across the table at me. The document references are just catalog numbers identifying files by their shelf location, no actual codewords referring to named projects. Typical of Angleton, to be so elliptical about things. “And I’d like you to deputize for me on the BLOODY BARON committee.”