Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Him and my line manager, both. At least, my old manager." The mugs of tea have been brewing long enough; I fish the bags out and add milk. "Here. You didn't tell me what else you've been doing."

"Doing?" She stares at me. "I've been passed around in a pressurised plastic sack by a bunch of soldiers, poked and prodded by doctors, grilled by security officers, and packed off home like a naughty little girl. I haven't exactly done much doing , if you follow. In fact-" She shakes her head in disgust. "Forget it."

"I can't." I can't meet her eyes, either. I'm staring at a cooling mug of tea, and all I can see are worms of pale light, writhing slowly. "I think this was important, Mo. To people other than us, people who'll sleep better at night now."

"Why. Me." She's gritting her teeth; platitudes won't work.

"Because you were there," I say tiredly. "Because someone in your town was trying to carry out a petty act of terrorism, and summoned up an ancient evil they couldn't control. Because you were close and were thinking the unthinkable on a regular, professional basis. A mind is a dangerous thing to taste, and sometimes-only sometimes-things come out of the woodwork that like the flavour of our thoughts. This particular thing was relying on our stupidity, or on our failure to recognise what it was, and used you as bait to sucker us in. We thought we were using you as bait, but all the time it was playing us like a fish on a line. In the end, at least five people died because of that mistake, and another is in hospital right now and maybe isn't going to make it."

"Thanks." Her tone of voice is like granite. "Whose mistake was it?"

"Committee decision." I put my mug down and look at her. "If we hadn't come after you, those other guys would still be alive. So I guess, from a purely utilitarian point of view everyone in the Laundry fucked up, all the way down the line, from start to finish. I shouldn't have come after you in Santa Cruz: end of story."

"Is that what you really think?" she asks, wonderingly.

I shake my head. "Sometimes we make mistakes for all the right reasons. If Angleton had run this according to the book, by our wonderful ISO-9000-compliant recipe for intelligence operations in the occult sphere, you'd be dead-and the ice giant would still have come through. We'd all have been dead, soon enough."

"Angleton broke the rules? I didn't think he was the type. Dried-up old bureaucrat."

"A vintage that sometimes isn't what it seems."

She stands up. "Why were you there?" she asks.

I shrug. "Did you expect me to leave you?"

She looks at me for a moment that feels like eternity. "I didn't know you long enough to guess the answer to that, before. Funny what a crisis teaches you about other people." She holds out a hand. "Brains probably isn't going to get back until seven and I need to go back to my flat in half an hour; give me a hand moving this thing off the table?" She gestures at the engine block.

"Guess so. Um, what are you planning on doing, if I may be so bold?"

"Doing?" She pauses with one hand on the Kettenkrad engine block: "I'm moving the rest of my stuff into Brains's room once he's gone. You didn't think you could get rid of me that easily, did you?" She grins, suddenly. "Want to help me pack?"

THE DEATH RATTLE OF A MORTALLY WOUNDED TELEPHONE is a horrible thing to hear at four o'clock on a Tuesday morning. It's even worse when you're sleeping the sleep that follows a pitcher of iced margueritas in the basement of the Dog's Bollocks, with a chaser of nachos and a tequila slammer or three for dessert. I come to, sitting upright, bare-ass naked in the middle of the wooden floor, clutching the receiver with one hand and my head with the other-purely to prevent it from exploding, you understand-and moaning quietly. "Who is it?" I croak into the microphone.

"Bob, get your ass down to the office right away. This line isn't secure." I recognize that voice: I have nightmares about it. That's because I work for its owner.

"Whoa, I was asleep, boss. Can't it"-I gulp and look at the alarm clock-"wait until morning?"

"No. I'm calling a code blue."

"Jesus." The band of demons stomping around my skull strike up an encore with drums. "Okay, boss. Ready to leave in ten minutes. Can I bill a taxi fare?"

"No, it can't wait. I'll have a car pick you up." He cuts the call, and that is when I start to get frightened because even Angleton, who occupies a lair deep in the bowels of the Laundry's Arcana Analysis Section-but does something far scarier than that anodyne title might suggest-is liable to think twice before authorising a car to pull in an employee at zero-dark o'clock.

I manage to pull on a sweater and jeans, tie my shoelaces, and get my ass downstairs just before the blue and red strobes light up the window above the front door. On the way out I grab my emergency bag-an overnighter full of stuff that Andy suggested I should keep ready "just in case"-and slam and lock the door and turn around in time to find the cop waiting for me. "Are you Bob Howard?"

"Yeah, that's me." I show him my card.

"If you'll come with me, sir."

Lucky me: I get to wake up on my way in to work four hours early, in the front passenger seat of a police car with strobes flashing and the driver doing his best to scare me into catatonia. Lucky London: the streets are nearly empty at this time of night, so we zip around the feral taxis and somnolent cleaning trucks without pause. A journey that would normally take an hour and a half takes fifteen minutes. (Of course, it comes at a price: Accounting exists in a state of perpetual warfare with the rest of the civil service over internal billing, and the Metropolitan Police charge for their services as a taxi firm at a level that would make you think they provided limousines with wet bars. But Angleton has declared a code blue, so…)

The dingy-looking warehouse in a side street, adjoining a closed former primary school, doesn't look too promising-but the door opens before I can raise a hand to knock on it. The grinning sallow face of Fred from Accounting looms out of the darkness in front of me and I recoil before I realise that it's all right-Fred's been dead for more than a year, which is why he's on the night shift. This isn't going to degenerate into plaintive requests for me to fix his spreadsheet. "Fred, I'm here to see Angleton," I say very clearly, then I whisper a special password to stop him from eating me. Fred retreats back to his security cubbyhole or coffin or whatever it is you call it, and I cross the threshold of the Laundry. It's dark-to save light bulbs, and damn the health and safety regs-but some kind soul has left a mouldering cardboard box of hand torches on the front desk. I pull the door shut behind me, pick up a torch, and head for Angleton's office.

As I get to the top of the stairs I see that the lights are on in the corridor we call Mahogany Row. If the boss is running a crisis team then that's where I'll find him. So I divert into executive territory until I see a door with a red light glowing above it. There's a note taped to the door handle: BOB HOWARD ACCESS PERMITTED. So I "access permitted" and walk right in.

As soon as the door opens Angleton looks up from the map spread across the boardroom table. The room smells of stale coffee, cheap cigarettes, and fear. "You're late," he says sharply.

"Late," I echo, dumping my emergency bag under the fire extinguisher and leaning on the door. " 'Lo, Andy, Boris. Boss, I don't think the cop was taking his time. Any faster and he'd be billing you for brown stain removal from the upholstery." I yawn. "What's the picture?"

"Milton Keynes," says Andy.

"Are sending you there to investigate," explains Boris.