Charles Stross: The Atrocity Archives

"We will just have to see." Angleton nods very slightly, his facial expression rigid. "Do you still have your lucky charm?"

"Had to use it." I'd shrug, if there was more room. "What do you think Bridget's up to?"

"I couldn't possibly comment." I'd take Angleton's dismissal as a put-down, but he points his chin at the man in the driver's seat. "When we get there, Bob, I want you to go in through the warehouse door and wake the caretaker. You have your mobile telephone?"

"Uh, yeah," I say, hoping like hell that the battery hasn't run down.

"Good. Andrew. You and I will enter through the front door. Bob, set your telephone to vibrate. When you receive a message from me, you will know it is time to have the janitor switch off the main electrical power. And the backup power."

"Oops." I lick my suddenly dry lips, thinking of all the electrical containment pentacles in the basement and all the computers plugged into the filtered and secured circuit on the other floors. "All hell's going to break loose if I do that."

"That's what I'm counting on." The bastard smiles , and despite all the horrible sights I've seen today so far, I hope most of all that I never see it again before the day I die.

"Hey, what about me?" Angleton glances at the front seat with a momentary flash of irritation. Josephine stares right back, clearly angry and struggling to control it. "I'm your liaison officer for North Buckinghamshire," she says, "and I'd really like to know who I'm liaising with, especially as you seem to have left a few bodies on my manor that I'm going to have to bury, and this jerk"-she means me, I am distraught! Oh, the ignominy!-"promised me you'd have the answers."

Angleton composes himself. "There are no answers, madam, only further questions," he says, and just for a second he sounds like a pious wanker of a vicar going through the motions of comforting the bereaved. "And if you want the answers you'll have to go through the jerk's filing cabinet." Bastard. Then there's a flashing sardonic grin, dry as the desert sands in June: "Do you want to help prevent any, ah, recurrence of what you saw an hour ago? If so, you may accompany the jerk and attempt to keep him from dying." He reaches out a hand and drops a ragged slip of paper over her shoulder. "You'll need this."

Provisional warrant card, my oh my. Josephine mutters something unkind about his ancestry, barnyard animals, and lengths of rubber hose. I pretend not to hear because we're about three minutes out, stuck behind a slow-moving but gregarious herd of red double-decker buses, and I'm trying to remember the way to the janitor's office in the Laundry main unit basement and whether there's anything I'm likely to trip over in the dark.

"EXCUSE ME FOR ASKING, BUT HOW MANY CORPSES do you usually run into in the course of your job?" I ask.

"Too many, since you showed up." We turn the street corner into a brick-walled alley crowded by wheelie bins and smelling of vagrant piss. "But since you ask, I'm a detective inspector. You get to see lots of vile stuff on the beat."

Something in her expression tells me I'm on dangerous ground here, but I persist: "Well, this is the Laundry. It's our job to deal with seven shades of vile shit so that people like you don't have to." I take a deep breath. "And before we go in I figured I should warn you that you're going to think Fred and Rosemary West work for us, and Harold Shipman's the medical officer." At this point she goes slightly pale-the Demon DIYers and Dr. Death are the acme of British serial killerdom after all-but she doesn't flinch.

"And you're the good guys?"

"Sometimes I have my doubts," I sigh.

"Well, join the club." I have a feeling she's going to make it, if she lives through the next hour.

"Enough bullshit. This is the street level entrance to the facilities block under Headquarters Building One. You saw what those fuckers did with the cameras at the car pound and Site Able. If my guess is straight, they're going to do it all over again here -or worse. From here there's a secure line to several of the Met's offices, including various borough-level control systems, such as the Camden Town control centre. SCORPION STARE isn't ready for nationwide deployment-"

"What the hell would justify that?" she demands, eyes wide.

"You do not have clearance for that information." Amazing how easily the phrase trips off the tongue. "Besides, it'd give you nightmares. But you're the one who mentioned hell, and as I was saying"-I stop, with an overflowing dumpster between us and the anonymous doorway-"our pet lunatic, who killed all those folks at Dillinger Associates and who is now in a committee meeting upstairs, could conceivably upload bits of SCORPION STARE to the various camera control centres. Which is why we are going to stop him, by bringing down the intranet backbone cable in and out of the Laundry's headquarters. Which would be easy if this was a bog-standard government office, but a little harder in reality because the Laundry has guards, and some of those guards are very special, and some of those very special guards will try to stop us by eating us alive."

"Eating. Us." Josephine is looking a little glassy. "Did I tell you that I don't do headhunters? That's Recruitment's job."

"Look," I say gently, "have you ever seen Night of the Living Dead ? It's really not all that different-except that I've got permission to be here, and you've got a temporary warrant card too, so we should be all right." A thought strikes me. "You're a cop. Have you been through firearms training?"

Click-clack. "Yes," she says drily. "Next question?"

"Great! If you'd just take that away from my nose-that's better-it won't work on the guards. Sorry, but they're already, uh, metabolically challenged. However, it will work very nicely on the CCTV cameras. Which-"

"Okay, I get the picture. We go in. We stay out of the frame unless we want to die." She makes the pistol vanish inside her jacket and looks at me askance-for the first time since the car pound with something other than irritation or dislike. Probably wondering why I didn't flinch. (Obvious, really: compared with what's waiting for us inside a little intracranial air conditioning is a relatively painless way to go, and besides, if she was seriously pissed at me she could have gotten me alone in a nice soundproofed cell back in her manor with a pair of size twelve boots and their occupants.) "We're going to go in there and you're going to talk our way past the zombies while I shoot out all the cameras, right?"

"Right. And then I'm going to try to figure out how to take down the primary switchgear, the backup substation, the diesel generator, and the batteries for the telephone switch and the protected computer ring main all at the same time so nobody twigs until it's too late. While fending off anyone who tries to stop us. Clear?"

"As mud." She stares at me. "I always wanted to be on TV, but not quite this way."

"Yeah, well." I glance up the side of the building, which is windowless as far as the third floor (and then the windows front onto empty rooms three feet deep, just to give the appearance of occupation). "I'd rather call in an air strike on the power station but there's a hospital two blocks that way and an old folks' home on the other side… you ready?"

She nods. "Okay." And I take a step round the wheelie bin and knock on the door.

The door is a featureless blue slab of paint. As soon as I touch it, it swings open-no creaking here, did you think this was a Hammer horror flick?-to reveal a small, dusty room with a dry powder fire extinguisher bolted to one wall and another door opposite. "Wait," I say, and take the spray paint can out of my pocket. "Okay, come on in. Keep your warrant note handy."