Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Oh? What would that be?"

I can't look her in the eye; I just can't. "My boss says he'd value your insight. On an informal basis."

Which is only half the truth. What I really want to say to her is: It's you they're after. As long as you're here in a Laundry safe house they can't get to you. But if we trail you in front of them, in the middle of a city that happens to be the Mukhabarat's headquarters for Western Europe, we might be able to draw them out. Get them to try again, under the guns of a friendly team. Be our tethered goat, Mo? But I'm chicken. I don't have the guts to ask her to bait my hook. I hold my tongue and I feel about six inches tall, and in my imagination I can see Andy and Derek nodding silent approval, and it still doesn't help. "Given enough pairs of eyes, all problems are transparent," I say, falling back to platitudes. "Besides, it's a great city. We could maybe study etchings together, or something."

"You need to work on your pickup lines," Mo observes, yanking a particularly limp segment of pizza base loose and holding it up. "But for the sake of argument, consider me charmed. How much will this trip cost?"

"Ah, now that's the good bit." I drain my mug and push it away from me. "There aren't many perks that come from working for the Laundry, but one of them is that it happens to be possible to get a cheap travel pass. Special arrangement with BA, apparently. All we have to pay is the airport tax and our hotel bill. Know any decent B amp;Bs out there?"

THREE DAYS FLICK BY LIKE MICROFICHE CARDS through the input hopper of Angleton's Memex. Mo has settled into the vacant room on the second floor of our safe house like a long-term resident; as a not very senior academic, her Ph.D. years not long behind her, she probably spent years in flat-shares like this. I focus on my day-to-day work, fixing broken network servers, running a security audit of some service department's kit (two illicit copies of Minesweeper and one MP3 music jukebox to eliminate), and spending the afternoons up in the secure office in the executive suite, learning the bible of field operations by heart. I try not to think about what I'm getting Mo into. In fact, I try not to see her at all, spending long hours into the evening poring over arcane regulations and petty incantations for coordinating joint task-force operations. I feel more than a little bit guilty, even though I'm only obeying orders, and consequently I feel a little bit depressed.

At least Mhari doesn't try to get in touch.

The Sunday before we're due to leave I have to stay home because I need to pack my bags. I'm dithering over a stack of T-shirts and an electric toothbrush when someone knocks on my bedroom door. "Bob?"

I open it. "Mo."

She steps inside, hesitant, eyes scanning. My room often has that effect on people. It's not the usual single male scattering of clothes on every available surface-aggravated by my packing-so much as the groaning, double-stacked bookcase and the stuff on the walls. Not many guys have anatomically correct life-sized plastic skeletons hanging from a wall bracket. Or a desk made out of Lego bricks, with the bits of three half-vivisected computers humming and chattering to each other on top of it.

"Are you packing?" she asks, smiling brightly at me; she's dressed up for a night out with some lucky bastard, and here's me wondering when I last changed my T-shirt and looking forward to a close encounter with a slice of toast and a tin of baked beans. But the embarrassment only lasts for a moment, until her wandering gaze settles in the direction of the bookcase. Then: "Is that a copy of Knuth?" She homes in on the top shelf. "Hang on-volume four ? But he only finished the first three volumes in that series! Volume four's been overdue for the past twenty years!"

"Yup." I nod, smugly. Whoever she's dating won't have anything like that on his shelves. "We-or the Black Chamber-have a little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of The Art of Computer Programming , and they don't render him metabolically challenged. At least, he doesn't publish it to the public; it's the one with the Turing Theorem in it. Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extradimensional Summoning. This is a very limited edition-numbered and classified."

"That's-" She frowns. "May I borrow it? To read?"

"You're on the inside now; just don't leave it on the bus."

She pulls the book down, shoves a bundle of crumpled jeans to one side of my bed to make room, and perches on the end of it. Mo in dress-up mode turns out to be a grownup designer version of hippie crossed with Goth: black velvet skirt, silver bangles, ethnic top. Not quite self-consciously pre-Raphaelite, but nearly. Right now she's destroying the effect completely by being 100 percent focussed on the tome. "Wow." Her eyes are alight. "I just wanted to see if you were, like, getting ready? Only now I don't want to go; I'm going to be up all night!"

"Just remember we need to be out the door by seven o'clock," I remind her. "Allow two hours for getting to Luton and check in…"

"I'll sleep on the plane." She closes the book and puts it down, but keeps one hand on the cover, protectively close. "I haven't seen you around much, Bob. Been busy?"

"More than you can imagine," I say. Setting up scanners that will slurp through the Laundry's UPI and Reuters news feeds and page me if anything interesting comes up while I'm away. Reading the manual for field operations. Avoiding my guilty conscience… "How about you?"

She pulls a face. "There's so much stuff buried in the stacks, it's unbelievable. I've been spending all my time reading, getting indigestion along the way. It's just such a waste-all that stuff, locked up behind the Official Secrets Act!"

"Yeah, well." It's my turn to pull a face now. "In principle, I kind of agree with you. In practice… how to put it? This stuff has repercussions. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set; play around with it for too long and horrible things can happen to you." I shrug. "And you know what students are like."

"Yes, well." She stands up, straightening her skirt with one hand and holding the book with the other. "I suppose you've got more experience of that than I have. But, well." She pauses, and gives a little half-smile: "I was wondering if, if you'd eaten yet?"

Ah. Suddenly I figure it out: I'm so thick. "Give me half an hour?" I ask. Where the hell did I leave that shirt? "Anywhere in particular take your fancy?"

"There's a little bistro on the high street that I was meaning to check out. If you're ready in half an hour?"

"Downstairs," I say firmly. "Half an hour!" She slips out of my room and I waste half a minute drooling at the back of the door before I snap out of it and go in search of something to wear that doesn't look too shop-soiled. The sudden realisation that Mo might actually enjoy my company is a better antidepressant than anything I could get on a prescription.

I'M BROUGHT TO MY SENSES BY THE SHRILL OF my alarm clock: it's eight in the morning, the sky's still dark outside, my head aches, and I'm feeling inexplicably happy for someone who this afternoon will be baiting the trap for an unknown enemy.

I pull on my clothes, grab my bags, head downstairs still yawning vigorously. Mo is in the kitchen, red-eyed and nursing a mug of coffee; there's a huge, travel-stained backpack in the hall. "Been up all night with the book?" I ask. She was thinking about it all through what was otherwise a really enjoyable quiet night out.

"Here. Help yourself." She points to the cafetière. She yawns. "This is all your fault." I glance at her in time to catch a brief grin. "Ready to go?"