Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Assuming it doesn't follow us up instead." Her expression clouds over in an instant: "Tell me the truth, Bob?"

My mouth turns dry: this is a moment I've been dreading even more than the discovery in the basement. "What?"

"Why are they after me?"

Oh, that truth. I manage to breathe again. "Your… research. And the stuff you were really working on in the States."

"You know about that." She looks tense and I suddenly wonder, How many secrets are we keeping from each other?

"Angleton told me about it. Black Chamber notified us when they deported you. Don't look so startled. About the restricted theoretical work on probability manipulation-lucky vectors, fate quantisation? It's all classified, but it's not-no, what I mean to say is, they don't like us running around on their turf, but information sharing goes on at different levels."

I point my skewer at her and dissemble creatively. "That stuff is fairly serious juju in our field. The Pentagon plays with it. We've got it. A couple of other countries have occult operations groups who make use of destiny entanglement fields. But the likes of Yusuf Qaradawi can't get his hands on it without a hell of a lot of reverse engineering, any more than the provisional IRA ever got their hands on cruise missile technology. The difference is, to build a cruise missile takes a ton of aerospace engineers, an advanced electronics industry, and factories. Whereas to build a scalar field that can locally boost probability coefficients attached to a Wigner's Friend observer-say, to allow a suicide bomber to walk right through a ring of bodyguards as if they aren't there-takes a couple of theoreticians and one or two field ops. Occult weapons are so much more portable that you can think in terms of stealing the infrastructure-if you've got people who can understand it. As most nongovernmental activist groups rely on cannon fodder so dumb they have 'mom' and 'dad' tattooed on their knuckles so the cops know who they belong to, that isn't usually much of a threat."

"But." She raises her last satay and swallows the skewered morsel. "This time there is." I see motion outside the window: see a familiar face, little more than a pale blur in the darkness, glance inside as it walks past.

"Evidently," I mumble, feeling guilty.

"So your bosses decided to trail me in public and see what they picked up while trying to identify the group by way of the museum basement," she adds briskly. "How many people are watching us, Bob?"

"At least one right now," I say, heart bouncing around my rib cage. "That I know of, I mean. This is supposed to be a full top-and-tail job, guards outside the hotel and round the clock watch on your movements. Same as most politicians at risk of assassination get. Not that we're expecting any suicide bombers," I add hastily.

She smiles at me warmly: "I'm so pleased to know that. It really makes me feel secure."

I wince. "Can you suggest any alternatives?" I ask.

"Not from your boss's-what's his name? Angleton? His point of view. No, I don't suppose there is." A waiter appears silently and removes our plates. She looks at me with an expression that I can't read. "Why are you here, Bob?"

"Uh…" I pause to get my thoughts in order. "Because it's my mess. I got roped in because I didn't follow procedures and hang you out to dry in California, and then I was there when things turned nasty, and this whole mess is classified up to stupid levels because there's a turf war going on between project management and operational executive-"

"That's not what I meant." She's silent for a moment. Then: "Why did you break the rules in Santa Cruz? Not that I object, but…"

"Because"-I inspect my wineglass-"I like you. I don't think leaving people I like in the shit is a good way to behave. And, frankly, I don't have a very professional attitude to my work. Not the way the spooks think I should."

She leans forward. "Do you have a more professional attitude to your work now?"

I swallow. "No, not really."

Something-a foot-rubs up and down my ankle and I nearly jump out of my skin. "Good." She smiles in a way that turns my stomach to jelly, and the waiter arrives with a precariously balanced pile of dishes before I can say anything and risk embarrassing myself. We just stare at each other until he's gone, and she adds: "I hate it when people let their professionalism get in the way of real life."

WE EAT, AND WE TALK ABOUT PEOPLE AND things, not necessarily in complimentary terms. Mo explains what it's like to be married to a New York lawyer and I commiserate, and she asks me what it's like to live with a manic-depressive psycho bitch from hell, and evidently she's been talking to Pinky and Brains about things because I find myself describing my relationship with Mhari with sufficient detachment that it might as well be over-ancient history. And she nods and asks if running into Mhari in Accounts and Payroll isn't embarrassing and this leads to a long discourse on how working for the Laundry is about as embarrassing as things can get: from the paper clip audits to the crazy internal billing system, and about how I hoped that getting into field ops would get me out from under Bridget's thumb, but no such luck. And Mo explains about tenure track backbiting politics in small American university departments, and about why you can kiss your career goodbye if you publish too much-as well as too little-and about the different ways in which a dual-income no-kiddies couple can self-destruct so messily that I'm left thinking maybe Mhari isn't that unusual after all.

We end up walking back to the hotel arm in arm, and under a broken streetlamp she stops, wraps her arms around me, and kisses me for what feels like half an hour. Then she rests her chin on my shoulder, beside my ear. "This is so good," she whispers. "If only we weren't being followed."

I tense. "We're-"

"I don't like being watched," she says, and we let go of each other simultaneously.

"Me neither." I glance round and see a lone guy on the street behind us looking in the window of a closed shop, and all the romance flees the evening like gas from a punctured balloon. "Shit."

"Let's just… go back. Hole up and wait for morning."

"I guess."

We start moving again and she takes my hand. "Great evening out. Try it again some time?"

I smile back at her, feeling both regret and optimism. "Yeah."

" Without the audience."

We reach the hotel, share a last drink, and head for our separate rooms.

I DREAM OF WIRES. DARK LANDSCAPE, COLD MUD. Something screams in the distance; lumpy shapes strung up on barbed wire stretched before the fortress. The screams get louder and there's a rumbling and crashing and somewhere in the process I become aware that I'm not dreaming-someone is screaming, while I lie in bed halfway between sleeping and waking.

I'm on my feet almost before I realise I'm awake. I grab a T-shirt and jeans, somehow slide my feet into both legs simultaneously and I'm out the door within ten seconds. The corridor is silent and dim, the only lighting coming from the overhead emergency strips; it's narrow, too, and by night the pastel-painted walls form a claustrophobic collage of grey-on-black shadows. Silence-then another scream, muffled, coming from upstairs. It's definitely human and it doesn't sound like anything you'd expect to hear from a hotel room at night. I pause for a moment, feeling silly as I consider that particular possibility-then duck back into my room and grab the multitool and the palmtop I've left atop the dresser. Now I head for the staircase.

Another scream and I take the steps two at a time. A door opens behind me, a tousled head poking out and mumbling, "I'm trying to sleep…"

The hair on my arms stands on end. The stair rail is glowing a faint, eerie blue; sparks sting my bare feet as I climb, and the handle of the fire door at the top of the stairs gives me a nasty shock. Air sighs past me, a thin breeze blowing along the corridor where blue flickering outlines the door frames in darkness. Another scream and this time a thudding noise, then a muffled crash; I hear a door slam somewhere below me, then the shattering whine of a fire alarm going off.