Jennifer Morgue (45 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
"Pretty much." Angleton nodded. His lip quirked oddly.
A suppressed smile?
"Jesus fucking Christ, Angleton, that's leaving just a little bit out. Not to mention Ramona. If you think you could tie our brains together like the Kilkenny cats, then just cut us loose — it doesn't work that way, you know"
"Yes." He nodded again. "And that's why you need to go to the Village," he said briskly. "Talk to her. Settle where you both stand, in your own mind." He picked up his papers and looked away, an implicit dismissal. I rose to my feet.
"Oh, and one other thing," he added.
"What"
"While you're about it, remember to talk to Dr. O'Brien as well. You both need to sort things out — and sooner, rather than later."
"He made it an order." She shrugs. "So here I am." Looking as if she'd rather be anywhere else on the planet.
"Enjoying yourself?" I ask. It's the sort of stilted, stupid question you ask when you're trying to make small talk but walking on eggshells in case the other person explodes at you. Which is what I'm half-expecting — this situation is a minefield.
"No," she says with forced levity. "The weather sucks, the beer's warm, the sea's too cold for swimming, and every time I look at it ..." She stalls, the thin glaze of collectedness cracking. "Can I sit down"
I pat the sofa beside me. "Be my guest."
She sits down in the opposite corner, an arm's length away.
"You're acting like you're mad at me." I glance at the book on the table. "I'm not mad at you." I try to figure out what to say next: "I'm mad at the way the circumstances made things turn out. Ate you still mad at her"
"At her?" She chuckles, startled. "I don't think she had any more choice in it than you did. Why should I be mad at her?" I pick up my glass and take a long mouthful of beer.
"Because we slept together?"
"Because you — what?" A waspish tone creeps into her, voice: "But I thought you said you hadn't!"
I put my glass down. "We didn't." I meet her eye. "In the Bill Clinton sense of things, I can honestly say I have not had sexual intercourse with that woman. You know what t h Black Chamber did to her? If I had slept with her I'd be dead."
"But how can you — " Mo is confused. "Her monster had to feed. Before you came and unbound'' it, it had to feed. She had to feed it, or it would have eaten her. I was along for the ride."
Enlightenment dawns. "But now she's there — " a wave i the vague direction of the drowned village of Dunwich, a mile out to sea, where the Laundry maintains its outpost " — and you're here. And you're both safe."
Acid indigestion. "Safe from what?" I ask, watching her sidelong.
"Safe from — " She stops. "Why are you looking at me"
"She's undergoing the change, you know that? They can usually hold it off, but in her case it's looking irreversible."
Mo nods, reluctantly.
"Probably it was triggered by the deep-diving excursion,"
I add. "Although proximity to certain thaumic resonances can bring it on prematurely." Which you would be in a position to know all about, I don't say. It's a horrible thing to suspect of anyone, especially your partner who you've been sharing a house with for enough years that it's getting to be a habit. "I gather they expect her to make it, with her mind intact."
"That's good," Mo says automatically. A double take: "Isn't it"
"I don't know. Is it a good thing?" I ask.
"That's not a question I'd have expected you to ask."
I sigh. None of this is straightforward. "Mo, you could have warned me they were training you in deep-cover insertion and extraction operations! Jesus, I thought / was the one on the sharp end!"
"And you were!" she snaps at me suddenly. "Did you wonder how I felt about it, every time you disappeared on a black bag job? Did you ask if maybe I was worried sick that you were never coming back? You know what I know, how helpless do you think that left me feeling"
"Whoa! I didn't want you to worry — "
"You didn't want! Jesus, Bob, what does it take to get through to you? You can't stop other people worrying just by not wanting them to. It's not about you, dim-bulb, it's about me. At least, this time it was. Or do you think I turned up there on your ass by accident"
I stare at her, at a loss for words.
"Let me lay it out for you, Bob. The whole solitary reason Angleton assigned you to that stupid rucking arrangement with Ramona was precisely because you didn't know what was going on. What you didn't know, you couldn't leak to Ramona."
"I got that much, but why — "
"Billington was enslaved by JENNIFER MORGUE Two sometime in the 70s, after the abortive attempt to raise the K-129. He tried to contact the chthonian using the Gravedust rig — a little private free enterprise, if you like.
JENNIFER MORGUE Two wanted out, and wanted out bad, but it needed someone to come and repair it. Billington provided it with a temporary host body, kitty kibble, and he had the resources to buy the Explorer — once the US Navy decommissioned it — and kit it out for a retrieval run. And we knew all this, on deep background, three years ago."
I blink. "Who is this 'we' you speak of"
"Me." She looks impatient. "And Angleton. And everybody else with BLUE HADES clearance who's been working on the project. Except for you, and a couple of others, who've been kept in a mushroom box against the day."
"Damn." I pick up my glass and drain what's left of the beer. "I need another drink." Pause. "You too"
"Make mine a double vodka martini on ice." She pulls a face. "I can't seem to kick the habit."
I stand up and walk inside to the bar, where the middle-aged barwoman is sitting on a stool poring over the Sudoku in the back of the Express. "Two double vodka martinis on ice." I say diffidently.
The woman puts her magazine down. She stares at me like I crawled out from under a rock. "You're going to say shaken, not stirred, ain't cha?" She's got a Midwestern accent: probably another defector, I guess. "You know how bad that tastes"
"Make it one shaken, one stirred, then. Off the ice. And easy on the vermouth." I wink. I go back towards the corner I'd claimed, then pause in the archway. Mo's leaning back in the sofa, infinitely familiar.
For a moment my breath catches in my throat and I have to stop and try to commit the picture to memory in case it turns out to be one of the last good times. Then I force myself to get my legs moving again.
"They'll be over in a minute," I say, dropping onto the sofa beside her.
"Good." She stares at the windows overlooking the beach.
"You know the Black Chamber wanted to get their hands on JENNIFER MORGUE. That's what McMurray was doing there."
"Yes." So she thinks I want to talk about business?
"We couldn't let them do that. But luckily for us, Billington ... well, he wasn't entirely sane to begin with, and when he came up with the idea of implementing a Hero trap, that made things a lot easier."
"Easier?" It's a good thing I don't have a drink in my hand.
"Absolutely." She nods. "Imagine if Billington had simply gone to the Black Chamber and said, 'Ten billion and it's yours,' keeping his fix-it plan to himself. But instead, he gets this idea that he's got to act in solitary as the prime mover in the scheme, and of course he's the archetype of the billionaire megalomaniac, so he does the obvious thing: leverages his assets. The Hero trap — the geas he built around that yacht — required a hero to trigger it. He figured the plot structure is deterministic: the hero fells into the bad guy's hands, the bad guy monologues — and at that point, he was going to destroy the trap, neuter the hero, who is just another civil servant at this point, stripped of the resonances of the Bond invocation — and allow his plan to proceed to completion."
"Except..."
"You know the alternative plot?" She glances at the book I've been reading: a biography of a playboy turned naval intelligence officer, news agency manager, and finally spy novelist.
"What?" I shake my head. "I thought it was — "
"Yes, it's so neat you can draw a flow chart. But it's nondeterministic, Bob: the Bond plot structure has a number of forks in it before it converges on the ending, with Mr. Secret Agent Man and his love interest getting it on in a lifeboat or the honeymoon suite of the QE2 or something. Including the approach to the villain. Billington didn't look into it deeply enough; he assumed that the Hero archetype would come looking for him and fall into his clutches directly."
"But." I snap my fingers, trying to collect my scattered thoughts. "You. Me. He got me, but I wasn't the real Bondfigure, right? I was a decoy."
She nods. "It happens. If the love interest ends up on the villain's yacht, being held prisoner, then the hero has to go after her. Or him. The real trick was the idea — I think it was Angleton's — of using the Good Bond Girl as a decoy by dressing her up in a tux and a shoulder holster. And then to figure out how to use this to get the Black Chamber to put one over on Billington."
"Ramona. She knew that I thought I was the agent in'' place, so she naturally assumed I really was the agent." '' "Right. And this also let us identify a leak in our own organization, because how else did Billington make you so rapidly? Which turns out to have been Jack. Last of the public school assholes, hung out to dry out where he couldn't do any damage — so he develops a sideline in selling intel to what he thinks is another disgruntled outsider."
"Urk." I suddenly remember the electrodynamic rig Griffin had stuck in his safe house and briefly wonder just what the hell else he might have been picking up on it, sitting pretty in the middle of the Caribbean with no supervision.
Mo falls silent. I realize she's waiting for something. My tongue's frozen: there are questions I want to ask, but it's a bad idea to ask something when you're not sure you want to hear the answer. "Did you enjoy being ... Bond?" I finally manage.
"Did I?" She raises an eyebrow. "Hell." She frowns. "Did you?" she demands.
"But I wasn't — "
"But you thought you were."
"No!" The very question is freighted with significance I don't want to explore. "I don't do high society, I don't smoke, I don't like being beaten up, being taken prisoner, being tortured, or fighting people, and I'm no good at the womanizing bit." I dry-swallow. "How about you"
"Well," she pauses to consider, "I'm nogood at womanizing either." Her cheek twitches. "Is that what this is about, Bob? Did you figure I was cheating on you"
"I was — " I clear my throat " — unsure where I stood."
"We need to talk about this. Get it out in the open some time. Don't we"
I nod. It's about all I can do.
"I didn't jump into bed with anybody else," she says briskly. "Does that make you feel better"
No, it doesn't. Now I feel like a shit for having asked in the first place. I make myself nod.
"Well, great." She crosses her arms, then taps her fingers on her upper arm: "Where have our drinks gotten to"
"I ordered the martinis. I guess she's taking her time."
Quick, change the subject. I really don't want us to fall down one of those embarrassing conversational potholes where the silence stretches out into an eloquent statement of mutual miscommunication: "So how did you manage to disguise yourself as Eileen? You really had me convinced at first."
"Oh, that was no big deal." Mo looks relieved. She smiles at me and my heart beats faster. "You know Brains has a sideline in cosmetology? Says some of his best friends are drag queens. Well, we've got enough surveillance background on Eileen to know what she looks like, so I got Brains out to the York to provide make-up services before the assault. Stick a class two glamour on top of the basics — a wig, the right clothes, some latex paint — and her own.
daughter wouldn't make her. We used Pale Grace(TM) for the finishing touch; it might be bugged, but we made sure I wouldn't see anything until I was aboard the ship. So I just headed for the control room using the maps we had on file from Angleton's — "
I raise a hand. "Hold it."
"What?" Mo stares at me.
"Have you got your violin?" I whisper, hunkering down.
"No, why — " Shit. "Our drinks are well overdue."
"And?"
"And this plot was set up by a document that's classified CASE BROCCOLI GOLDENEYE, Angleton said, and Predictive Branch said I needed to be here, and..."
"And?" — I kneel on the floor and pull my mobile phone out, flick the switch to silence it, then put it in camcorder mode. I sneak it out from behind the sofa, then pull it back and inspect the bar. There's nobody there. I swear quietly, and call up my thaumic scratchpad application. Then I tip my glass upside down over the table, and draw my fingers through the resulting beer suds frantically, wishing I hadn't downed the pint and left myself mere drops to work with.
"Have you got that stupid piece of paper on you"
"What, the license to kill? It's just a prop, it doesn't mean anything — "
"So pass it here, then. We haven't had plot closure yet, and you're not the only one who can use cosmetics and a class two glamour."
"Shit," Mo whispers back at me, and rolls forwards onto the floor. "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking"
"What, that we've been followed home by a manifestly evil mistress of disguise who is hankering for revenge because we got her husband stomped into pink slime by a chthonian war machine"
There's a disturbingly solid click-chunk from the front door, like a Yale lock engaging.
"Do you know the ending of Diamonds Are Forever? The movie version with Sean Connery?" I meet Mo's eyes for a moment, and in a disturbing flash of clarity I realize that she means a whole lot more to me than the question of who she has or hasn't been having sex with. Then she nods and rolls away from the floor in front of the sofa, and I hit the button on my phone just as there's a flat percussive bang: not the ear-slamming concussion I expect from a pistol, but muffled, much quieter.
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