Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"You don't have clearance," he says. "Let it drop. That's an order."

The door shuts. Harriet stands there for a moment, her jaw working soundlessly as if she's forgotten how to speak. I commit the spectacle to memory for future enjoyment. "Don't think this is the last you'll hear of this," she snaps at me as she leaves, slamming the door.

TWO DEAD IN MURDER, SUICIDE. Hmm. Ahnenerbe. Thule Gesellschaft. Incubi. German accents. Opener of the Ways. Double-hmm. I pull my terminal closer; it's only got access to low-classification and public sources, but it's time to do some serious data mining. I wonder… just what have Yusuf Qaradawi's friends and the Mukhabarat got to do with the last and most secret nightmares of the Third Reich?

THE NEXT DAY I GO INTO THE OFFICE AND FIND Nick waiting for me at my desk like an overexcited trainee schoolmaster. This is an unscheduled intrusion in my plans, which mostly revolve around applying some security patches to the departmental file server and digging out the maintenance schematics to Angleton's antique Memex.

"Come along now! I've got something to show you," he says, in a tone that makes it clear I don't have any choice. He leads me up a staircase carpeted in a thick bottle-green pile that I haven't seen before, then along a corridor with dark, oak-panelled walls like a provincial gentlemen's club from the 1930s, except that gentlemen's clubs don't come with closed circuit TV cameras and combination locks on the doors.

"What is this place?" I ask.

"Used to be the director's manor," he explains. "When we had a director." When we had a director: I don't ask. He stops at a thick oak door and punches some digits into the lock, then opens it. "After you," he says.

There's a conference table and a modern-by Laundry standards-laptop set up at one end of it. A whole shitload of electronics racked up on shelves behind, along with some thick leather-bound books and a bunch of stuff like silver pencils, jars of mouldy dust, and what looks for all the world like a polygraph. As I go in I notice that the doorframe is unusually thick and there are no outside windows. "Is this shielded?" I ask.

Nick nods jerkily. "Well spotted, that man! Now sit down," he suggests.

I sit. The top shelf of the equipment rack is dominated by a glass bell jar with a human skull in it; I grin back at it. " 'Alas, poor Yorick.' "

"Carry on like you have been and maybe your head will fetch up in there one day," Nick says, grinning. "Ah." The door opens. "Andy."

"Why am I here?" I ask. "All this cloak and dagger shit is-"

Andy drops a fat lever-arch file on the table in front of me. "Read and enjoy," he says dryly. "One day you, too, can have the fun of maintaining this manual."

I open the cover to be confronted by a sheet which basically says I can be arrested for so much as thinking about disclosing the contents of the next page. I flip to page two and read a paragraph that essentially says "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," so I turn that one over and get to the title page: FIELD OPERATIONS MANUAL FOR COUNTER-OCCULT OPERATIONS. Below it, in small print: Approved by Departmental Quality Assurance Team and then Complies with BS5750 standard for total quality management. I shudder. "Since when have we been into mummification?" I ask.

"Embalming-" Andy frowns for a moment. "Oh, you mean total quality-" He stops and clears his throat. "One of these days your sense of humour is going to get you into trouble, Bob."

"Thanks for the advance warning." I look at the manual gloomily. "Let me guess. I'm to do as we discussed earlier-by the book. This book, right? Why wasn't I issued it before Santa Cruz?"

Andy pulls out the chair beside me and flops down in it. "Because that wasn't officially an operation," he says in tones of sweet reason. "That was an informal information-gathering exercise involving a nonclassified source. Operations require sign-off at director level. Informal information-gathering exercises don't."

I put the folder down on the table. "Does Bridget have anything to do with this?"

"Tangentially."

Nick sniffs, loudly, from his post by the door. "Arse-covering, boy. That was meant to be a risk-free chat. This is about what you do when you're ordered to stick your head in the lion's mouth. Or up its arse to inspect the hemorrhoids."

I look round at him. "You're planning on sending me on an op?" I ask. "Happy joy. Not."

Andy glances at Nick. "He's beginning to get it," he comments.

"Are you planning on involving Professor O'Brien in this?" I ask. "I mean, it seems to me that she's the one under threat. Isn't she?"

"Well." Andy glances at Nick, then back at me. "You're on active service, so you need to know this stuff inside out and upside down. But you're right, the specific reason for this session is what happened the other night. I can't confirm or deny the identities of anyone else involved, though."

"Then I've got a problem," I tell him. "I don't know if I should bring it up right now, but if I sit on it and I'm wrong… well, way I see it is, Mo is the one who's under threat and in need of protection. Right? I mean, I can cope with being drooled over by things with more tentacles than brains, but it's not exactly part of her job description, is it? You're supposed to be responsible for her safety. If you've got me going over rules of engagement, and she's involved, then when the shooting starts-"

Andy is nodding. It's a bad sign when your boss starts nodding at you before you finish each sentence.

"As a matter of fact I agree with your concerns completely," he says. "And yes, I agree we've got a problem. But it's not quite what you think it is." He leans forward and makes a steeple out of his fingers, elbows together on the table. The steeple leans sideways at an architecturally unsound angle. "We can probably keep her safe indefinitely, as long as she's locked down under a protection program and resident in one of our secure accommodation units. That's not in question; if nobody can see or track her, they can't attack her-although I'm not sure about the inability to track given that they must have obtained samples in order to spring that incubus on her last month. What concerns me is that such a posture is essentially defensive. We don't know for sure just what we're defending against, Bob, and that's bad."

Andy takes a deep breath, but Nick jumps in before he can continue: "We've dealt with Iraqi spies before, boy. This doesn't smell like them."

"Uh." I pause, unsure what to say. "What do you mean?"

"He means that the Mukhabarat simply don't have the technology to summon an incubus. Nor do they generally manage incarnations that leave Precambrian slime all over the carpet; about all they're up to is interrogation and compulsion of Watchers and a little bit of judicious torture. No real control of phase-space geometry, no Enochian deep grammar parse-tree generators-at least none that we've seen the source code to. So we can't make any assumptions about the attacks on Mo. Someone tried to grab her for whatever purpose. By now, they must know we're onto them. The next logical step is for them to pull back and switch track to whatever they were working on in the first place-which is extremely dangerous for us because if they were trying to snatch her, they were probably working on weapons of mass destruction. We badly need to get them out in the open and our only bait is Professor O'Brien. But if she knows she's bait, she'll keep looking round for sharks-which will tip them off. So we're assigning you to shadow her, Bob. You keep an eye on her. We'll keep an eye on you. When they bite, we'll reel them in. You don't need to know how, or when, but you'll do well to read this manual so you know how we set up this kind of situation. Clear?"