The Annihilation Score (8 page)

We deposit my suitcase, I show him Lecter and let him hand-check the sides and back of the case, then I take my badge and go in search of the borrowed conference room.

It's funny how the mere anticipation of a verbal confrontation can be worse than life-and-death combat: my stomach is hollow and chest a little fluttery. The floors in this building are paved in Italian marble, uncarpeted, utterly lethal if you slip, and liable to cause permanent hearing damage if you walk on them for too long in heels. It's enough to make me long for the beige institutional carpet of the New Annex—

And then I'm standing in front of a pair of imposing black double doors framed by Corinthian columns, surmounted by an arch with painted putti blowing on the sails of ships of the line. I take a deep breath and knock, twice.

Vikram opens the door; he looks nearly as nervous as I feel. “Oh good, we were getting worried,” he says.
Worried?

“Is there a problem?” I ask cautiously.

“Yes, we've been running interference from upstairs, but . . .” He steps backwards. “Come on in. We have coffee and refreshments.”

I follow him into the room. It's about the size of an aircraft carrier's hangar deck, with baroque gilt-encrusted benches and side-tables drawn up against wood-paneled walls that have fossilized under the weight of their decorative plasterwork. The floor-to-ceiling windows admit a waterfall of golden afternoon light that floods the room and washes across a hand-woven Persian carpet that must have cost a prince's ransom.

“Ah, Dr. O'Brien.” I nearly jump out of my skin: It's Dr. Michael (never a Mike) Armstrong, the Senior Auditor. He smiles like a tired crocodile. “What a relief. Are you well?”

I manage not to stagger under the weight of his regard: he actually looks
concerned
. “Have you spoken to Bob this morning?” I ask.

“Yes—wait, not since the early hours.” His left eyebrow wrinkles. “Is something the matter?”

“Um.” I glance round. He's brought a couple of admin bodies I don't know, but some faces I expected to see are absent. “Yes, but I'm not sure it's relevant to the matter in hand. Where's Judith?”

“Dead.”

“What?”

Armstrong clasps his hands behind his back, as sober as a funeral director. “Last night, during the Code Red. We were attacked at the New Annex.”

“I knew that, but—
Judith
?” Dr. Carroll was the second ranking Auditor who dealt with our department. I was expecting her to chair this session. She wasn't exactly a friend, but I was certain I'd get a fair hearing from her, and to learn that she's dead so recently comes like a punch in the guts.

He looks at me, his expression deceptively mild. “We lost others.”

“Oh my God.”

“Andrew Newstrom. Doris Goodman. James Angleton.”

“Oh my—” My knees nearly give way. Everything's a blur. The next thing I know, the Senior Auditor has my arm—he's almost
holding me up—and is leading me towards a chair. “—God.” It's not that it's entirely news to me: I knew we'd lost Angleton. But the scale of it hits me hard. And Andy was a friend: not a close one, but a friend nonetheless.

“God won't help you, I'm afraid,” the SA murmurs sympathetically. More loudly: “I'm sorry, you should have been kept informed.”

“But—Andy?”

“Yes.” I feel the hard edge of a chair butt up against my legs: I allow myself to collapse onto it. “Your husband is picking up the pieces.”

“But he's—” My lips don't seem to want to work properly: I take a few seconds to get them back under control. “This is a catastrophe.”

“Yes,” he agrees.

It puts everything that's happened to me in the past twenty-four hours in a new perspective. Tilt-shift mode on a shiny new digital camera: all of a sudden, your larger-than-life problems look like a miniature diorama. “Oh God. Bob and I had a huge row. If I'd known—”

“Not to worry,” Dr. Armstrong murmurs gently. He sits down beside me. “I'm sure allowances will be made, accommodations can be reached. But that's not what we're here for, is it?”

Oh, that.
“No,” I agree.

“You know what's coming next.” It's a statement, not a question.

“Give me a couple of seconds, please? This is all a bit of a shock.” I reach for the empty chair on my other side, and lay Lecter's case there. I try to relax, even though every instinct tells me to tense up. What's coming next is one of the scariest nonviolent experiences you can undergo—and if you work for the Laundry, you
will
undergo it, sooner or later. “I'm ready now.” I turn my head and stare into his eyes, which are deep and brown and have unusually long lashes.

“All right. Sabbath. Claymore. Diamond. Rocket. Execute Sitrep One.”

My tongue feels like a lump of wood: my eyes do not belong to me. Something inside my head uses my larynx to make its report:
“Subjective integrity is maintained. Subjective continuity of experience is maintained. Subject observes no tampering.”

“Good.” The Senior Auditor smiles warmly. “Execute Sitrep Two.”

“Subjective operational readiness state: green. Subjective background state: amber, trending to red.”

“Hmm.” His smile slips. “Exit supervision.” A brief pause: “Mo, before we get to the main business of this meeting, in your own words—how was your trip going, before you were recalled? Was there a message for us?”

The unseen narrator using my vocal cords goes back to sleep. I clear my throat as I regain control of my own mind. “Ramona invited me to come visit some time. We had a lengthy gossip sesh. But that's all. Nothing substantial.”

“Nice to know the neighbors are steady.” The set of his shoulders relaxes slightly. “So. Tell me what happened in Trafalgar Square . . .”

My shoulders tense. “Total screw-up, I'm afraid. I went in under-informed and under-equipped and didn't even notice the news crew until it was way too late. Also, um, I'd like to report that I had some self-control issues. Nearly took out my personal frustration on the idiot who caused the scene. Utterly unconscionable, and I was able to stop myself, but. But. You need to know—”

He raises a hand and I manage to stop myself before I begin to babble. Then he speaks, his voice low and soothing: “You dealt with a crisis while sleep-deprived and in the wake of a major domestic argument, and you dealt with it effectively. Did you rough him up? If not, I see no problem here except that perhaps the DO should have looked a little further before assigning assets to deal with what appeared at first to be a trivial distraction. That you feel the need to confess that you were tempted is creditable but, under the circumstances, unnecessary: we do not punish people for thoughtcrime, Dr. O'Brien.” He pauses. “And in any event, we would have encountered this particular crisis sooner or later, regardless of who had to deal with the feckless Mr. Spratt. It was just bad luck that it happened to you rather than to someone else.”

“What crisis?” I pause long enough to lick my lips. “The Code Red?”

“Dealt with,” he says, with a dismissive wave of the hand. “The PHANGs are locked down tight, the external and internal threats have been neutralized”—for a moment there's a flicker of fire in his eyes—“and damage control is in hand. No, this isn't the disciplinary hearing you were expecting: we have another crisis to deal with.” He gestures at the boardroom table at the far end of the room. “So, whenever you're ready . . .”

BRIEFINGS

It takes a few minutes, but eventually everybody is seated around the table. I'm about to go to the foot of it, but the SA shakes his head and directs me towards a seat immediately to his left—and he's chairing it. “Mr. Choudhury, if you'd like to start the briefing?”

Vikram clears his throat. He looks worried. “Do we have time?” he asks. “She's due in front of the CO subcommittee in Conference Room A at five, and they don't like to be kept waiting—”

“They'll wait for us.” The SA is imperturbable. “She needs to be fully briefed, Vikram.
Fully
briefed.”

“Fully—” Vik shakes his head. “We could be here all week. Is she cleared?”

“She is now.” Dr. Armstrong looks at me. So does everyone else: I try not to shrink into a puddle in my seat. We have Jez Wilson and Gerry Lockhart, both with bags under their eyes. Jez manages Support and Liaison Ops, a euphemism that covers our friends from the Artists' Rifles in Hereford; Gerry is in charge of External Assets, which, if this were a Bond movie, would be the double-0 section. There's a woman I don't know by name but associate with Audit Ops, kindly
face, twinset and pearls; an elderly fellow with a halo of flyaway hair and a bushy Einsteinian mustache; and Emma MacDougal from HR. The point is, everyone I recognize here deals with Mahogany Row—the organization's elite tier of semiautonomous practitioners—on a daily basis: some of them even have offices there. Which makes this a worryingly high-powered meeting.

“Dominique, welcome to the INCORRIGIBLE working group, whose deliberations you are now on the approved list for. We're missing a few faces today—Angleton and Judith are terrible losses—so I'm afraid we're going to have to improvise a bit. Mr. Choudhury?”

Vikram clears his throat. “You have probably noticed we have a growing problem with paranormal vigilantes,” he begins, then stops and shrugs. “And hooligans, like this morning's miscreant. I'm sorry. If not for last night's emergency, you wouldn't have been in the firing line . . . but what's done is done, and the genie is out of the bottle.”

The genie? Paranormal vigilantes? INCORRIGIBLE working group? What
is
this?
I shake my head.

“Allow me to recap.” Vik walks over to a trolley with a laptop and overhead projector mounted on it. There's a screen situated in front of the wall that I hadn't paid any attention to before. He fidgets with the laptop for a moment, then brings up a graph. “CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN began, let's see, nineteen months ago.” A vertical dotted line appears near the left of the time line. “We're here.” Another dotted line marches up the screen near the right-hand edge of the graph. “Here's one of the side effects: the frequency curve for paranormal incidents. Defined as ordinary people who wake up one morning and discover they have acquired a talent for summonings and bindings, ritual magic—which they mistake for superpowers.”

Oh dear.
It's your classic growth curve, starting low and staying low until about three months ago. Then it begins to double. And double again, rising fast, until it hits the dateline. Either the first quartile of a sigmoid curve, or—don't go there—an exponential.

“Until recently we were seeing perhaps two or three incidents per ten million people per month. But we're now up to one per million and climbing. If we extrapolate forward, we get to here,” says Vik.
Another graph, with the first one shrunk down to occupy the left hand side of the screen. “If the growth rate doesn't show signs of slackening soon, if we're looking at a genuine exponential, it tends towards infinity in another four months. At which point we hit the, um, superhero singularity.”

I can't seem to help myself: I know it's bad form, but I interrupt. “Wait. Can you characterize these incidents? How serious are they?”

“Ah,
that
.” Vikram smiles ruefully. “It's a bit difficult. There seems to be a power law function covering the spread of abilities. Next slide . . .” He brings it on-screen and, yes, it shows a classic bell curve—a Gaussian distribution—with the left side cut off around the eightieth percentile. “Here we are. Really minor anomalies don't show up at all: I mean, we've got no way of identifying a four-year-old whose puppy always comes when she calls it, have we? Or a trawlerman who can call fishes, but is over quota and landing them illegally on the black market in Portugal. Now, a fifteen-year-old with the ability to control animals is a bit more obvious, especially if they attract attention by making a passing police horse tap-dance for their friends. And at the other end of the bell curve they stick out like a sore thumb: there was that business in Walthamstow last week, the, ah, ‘crazy cat lady.'”

I don't remember hearing about a crazy cat lady in Walthamstow last week, but I've been a bit too busy to bother with the newspapers or TV news for the past few months. Judging by the winces around the table I must have missed out on something really extraordinarily noteworthy. I nod politely.

“More disturbingly, there are the negative powers. PHANG syndrome you know about. There are others. Being able to transform bits of your body into other objects might sound like a superpower until you get it wrong—there's been an uptick in some really bizarre teratomas—cancers that look like fully developed organs in inappropriate places. Human Torches who lose self-control for even a second end up with a coroner delivering a narrative verdict of Spontaneous Human Combustion. And there seems to be an association, as one would expect, between people with abilities to the right of the normal
distribution and, um, Krantzberg syndrome. We're already seeing the first rapid-onset dementia cases, some as young as thirteen.”

Oh good grief,
I think again.

K syndrome is an unpleasant side effect of practicing ritual magic. If you solve the right theorems in your head, you can invoke various interesting extradimensional entities and make them
do things
. But there's a cost. Microscopic Eaters phase in and out of our universe in response to the thaum fields generated in this way. And sometimes, some of them pause for long enough to take a microscopic bite out of your gray matter until you go “insane on the brane” as Bob puts it. Once they get started they tend to come back to the buffet: K syndrome is progressive, and the only way to stop it progressing is to
stop practicing magic
.

“We believe the superpowers are a direct side effect of unconstrained background cognitive bandwidth processing. Bluntly, random people are thinking themselves into modes where they attract Actor/Agent entities and acquire various . . . abilities. It's not yet obvious whether this is a true exponential, or just a step-function that will stabilize soon, but in the worst case, in another few months, almost everyone will be above the minimum threshold for ritual activation.”

“Oh
dear
,” Emma MacDougal says faintly, and fans herself with a notepad. “That's
really
going to complicate our recruitment process.” I couldn't put it better myself.

“I do not believe it is going to go that far,” Dr. Armstrong says calmly. “Professor Ford is preparing a report. Although he isn't willing to release it until he's triple-checked everything, he says that the step-function model is most likely to hold true, and that the rate of increase will taper off shortly. Something about there being no true singularities in nature, outside of a black hole.”

I take a deep breath and let it go slowly. If Mike Ford says it's so, then there's
some
reason for hope: he's our resident expert on CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the conjunction of stellar drift, the dreaming monkey population spike, and the computational singularity that is responsible for the surge in magic. If he's right, it's not the end of the
world as we know it, just a very annoying new problem to deal with. He's been known to be wrong from time to time, but if he is, the prospect of everyone on the planet suddenly acquiring superpowers simply doesn't bear thinking about.

“Yes, well. One may hope he's right again.” Vikram taps a key on the laptop. “Let me give you some examples. Annie Smith, from Leicester, aged twenty-two, works in a Poundland store. Last Friday robbers broke in through the loading bay as the manager was cashing up. They knew where the alarm cable run was located—the police are sure there was an inside accomplice—and they were attempting to make off with the previous three days' takings when Annie knocked them unconscious by bouncing them off the ceiling. Not the false ceiling, mind you, but the concrete ceiling one and a half meters above the suspended tiles. Annie is a hundred and forty-five centimeters tall—four feet and nine inches in old money—and weighs fifty kilos: they outweighed her four to one. Then there's Geraldine Fawcett, eighty-two, of Oakshott, who has taken to wearing fishnet hose and a merry widow, and fights late night noise nuisances by—”

He goes on for another couple of increasingly surreal, not to say implausible, minutes before the SA clears his throat pointedly.

“Yes?”

“As you have already noted, we have limited time. Can I suggest we proceed to the psychological/media profile problem next?”

“If you insist.” Vikram pauses for long enough to take a mouthful of water from the glass in front of his place setting. “The reason we are seeing such a surge in Lycra futures is that ordinary people who know nothing about our business interpret their new abilities in terms of their pre-existing cognitive biases. A century ago it would have been framed in terms of miracles and angels and devils: witchcraft, in other words. But this is the twenty-first century in Britain, where the most rapidly growing religious demographic is ‘none of the above.' And for the past few decades we've lived in a media environment where a particular fictional genre has been growing in popularity. I refer, of course, to the American superhero movie—”

“What about comics?” asks the fellow with the flyaway hair. He
seems enthused. “Surely Marvel and DC are somewhat to blame? I remember when they first arrived on these shores in the 1960s . . .”

“Yes, comics too, I suppose, but movies reach a bigger audience,” Vikram says wearily. He looks as if he's been back and forth over this ground until it's churned into mud. “Superman, Iron Man, Batman”—Flyaway Hair winces visibly—“you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals. Reprehensible lawless vigilantes! It would be so much easier if we had Greek or Roman gods and demigods to deal with instead . . . ACPO are spitting blood.” (ACPO is the Association of Chief Police Officers, the not-a-trade-union for supercops that handles a lot of outsourced high-level policing policy work on behalf of the Home Office.) “The Home Office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don't follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basket-load of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage . . .”

Oh.
Oh.
I finger a simple chord on my blotter, then realize that Gerry Lockhart is staring at my hand with an expression of deep distaste, and force myself to stop fidgeting.
John
bloody
Williams
. Why do I have to be earwormed by the first violin's theme from
Superman
right now?

“Are any of them attributing it to magic?” I ask.

“Yes, some.” Vikram frowns. “But it's currently running at less than twenty percent. Superhero is the dominant paradigm, and new fish tend to swim with the school. Why do you ask?”

“Well, let's see. Am I right in thinking that the nature of the INCORRIGIBLE problem is that we are dealing with a plague of untrained occult practitioners who are interpreting their somewhat random skills as superhero abilities?”

Vikram nods, but the Senior Auditor takes it upon himself to reply. “Essentially yes, you've nailed it. But there's more to it than that. Jez?”

Vikram takes his seat as Jez Wilson nods and picks up the thread. “The real problem isn't just identification and suppression, Dr. O'Brien. The real problem is that it's
too public
. It caught us on the hop, and now the news media are sensitized so they're picking it up everywhere. The usual press chorus,
something must be done
, is already tuning up. The business this morning is just the latest and worst case, and your showing up on camera may actually be a blessing in disguise, because we need to find a way to get in front of the situation and take overt action to bring the paranormally enhanced under control—otherwise we're going to be run ragged dealing with this nonsense rather than focusing on the organization's core mission.”