The Atrocity Archives (15 page)

A crescent-shaped plate of gyoza appears on the
table between us, and for a couple of minutes we're busy eating; then
bowls of soup arrive and I'm busy juggling chopsticks, spoon, and
noodles that are making a bid for freedom.

"So." She drains her bowl, lays the chopsticks
across it, and sits up to watch me. "Let's summarise. I've stumbled
across a research field that's about as critical to your—the
Laundry—as
if I'd been working on nuclear weapons research without realising it.
In this country, everyone who works on this stuff works for the
Laundry, or not at all. So the Laundry has sucked me in and you're here
to give me an update so I know what I'm swimming in."

"Other people's dirty underwear, mostly," I say
apologetically.

"Yeah, right. And this concern for keeping me
updated was all your own idea too, huh? Just what the hell was going on
in Santa Cruz? Who were those guys who snatched me, and what were
you
doing?"

"I won't say I wasn't asked to have a discreet
chat with you." I put my spoon down, then turn it over. Then over
again. "Look, the Laundry is first and foremost a
self-perpetuating bureaucracy, like any other government agency, right?
SOP, when shit hits the fan in the field, is to protect head office by
pulling back feelers." I turn the spoon over. "When I got home I was
carpeted for going after you—given a going over in front of my boss."

"You were what?" Her eyes widen. "I don't
remember you—"

I pull a face. "Standard protocol if something
goes down is to get the hell out of town, Mo. But you were obviously in
over your head when you rang, so I went round your place and followed
you to that safe house they were holding you in. Phoned your mobile,
expecting a diversion tap, and the next thing I knew I was sitting up
in hospital with a hangover and no alcohol to show for it, being
grilled by the Feds. Very clever of me, but at least they pulled us
both out alive. Anyway, when I got home it turned out that officially
none of that shit happened. You were not abducted by, ahem, Middle
Eastern gentlemen who might or might not have been working for a guy
called Tariq Nassir, with connections to Yusuf Qaradawi. You were not
being kept under surveillance by the Black Chamber. Because if either
of those things were true, it would be Bad, and if it was Bad, it would
put a black mark on my boss's record book. And she wants her KCMG and
DBE so bad you can smell it when she walks in the door."

Mo is silent for a while. "I had no idea," she
says presently. There's a slightly wild look in her eyes: "They were
talking about killing me! I heard them!"

"Officially it didn't happen, but
unofficially—Bridget isn't the only poker player in the Laundry." I
shrug. "One of the other players wants to hear your side of the story,
off the record." I glance round. "This is
not
the place for
it.
Even with a fuzzbox."

"I—huh." She checks her watch. "An hour to go.
Look, Bob. If you've got time to come back to my place for a coffee
before I turf you out, we should talk some more." She looks
at me warningly: "I'm going to have to kick you out at nine-thirty,
though. Got a date."

"Well okay." I don't think I show any sign of
guilty disappointment—or relief that I won't have an opportunity to
outscore Mhari at her own game this once. Besides which, I think Mo is
too nice to play that kind of dirty trick on. I raise a hand and a
waiter zips over, swipes my credit card through her handheld, and
wishes me a nice day.

We head over to Mo's place and I get a bit of a
surprise; she's renting a flat in a centralish part of Putney, all wine
bars and bistros. We catch the tube over and end up walking downstairs
from an overhead platform: you know you're entering suburbia when the
underground trains poke their noses up into the open air. She walks
very fast, forcing me to hurry to keep up. "Not far," she remarks,
"just round a couple of corners from the tube stop."

She marches up a leaf-messed street in near
darkness, hemmed in to either side by parked cars, everything washed
out by orange sodium lights. I can feel the first chilly fingers of
autumn in the air. "It's up here," she says, gesturing at a front door
set back from the road, with a row of buzzers next to it. "Just a sec.
I'm on the third floor, by the way; I've got the attic." She fumbles
with a key in the lock and the door swings open on a darkened vestibule
as the skin on the back of my neck begins to prickle, while the sound
goes flat and the light deadens.

"Wait—" I begin to say, and something uncoils
from the shadows and lashes out at Mo with a noise like an explosion in
a cat factory.

She barely makes a noise as it grabs her with
about a dozen tentacles—no suckers here—and yanks her into the
darkened
vestibule. I scream, "Shit!" and jump back, then yank at my belt where
I happen to have clipped my multitool: the three-inch blade flips out
and locks as I fumble around the inside of the door for a light switch,
left-handed, holding the knife in front of me.

Now I hear a muffled squeaking noise—Mo is on
the floor up against an inner doorway, screaming
her head off. What looks like a nest of pythons has wriggled under the
woodwork and is trying to drag her in by the neck. But whatever field
is damping my hearing is also stifling her cries, and the thing has got
her arms and torso. Behind her, the door is bulging; the light from the
bulb overhead is attenuated to a dull, candlelike flicker.

I step back, yank out my mobile phone, and hit a
quick-dial button, then throw it into the roadway outside. Then I take
a deep breath and force myself to go back inside.

"Get it off me!"
she mouths, thrashing
around. I lean over her and try sawing at one of the tentacles. It's
dry and leathery and squirms underneath the blade, so I jab the point
of the knife into it and force my weight down.

The thing on the other side of the door goes
apeshit: a banging and crashing resounds through the floor as if
something huge is trying to break down the wall. The tentacles around
Mo tighten until her mouth opens and I'm terrified she's going to turn
blue. Something black begins to ooze out around my knife so I
concentrate on ramming the thing down against the floor and slicing
from side to side. It feels as if I'm trying to skewer a rubber band
big enough to power a wind-up freight locomotive.

Mo thrashes around until her back is against the
door; her eyes roll and I give a desperate yank on the tentacle with my
free hand. The pain is indescribable: it feels like I've just grabbed
hold of a mass of razor blades. Something black and oily is squirting
out around the knife blade and I try to keep my hand out of it. How
long is it going to take Capital Laundry Services to answer the sodding
phone and get a Plumber out here? Too fucking long—a quarter of an
hour
at least. Maybe I can do something else—

A steel vice closes around my left ankle and
yanks my shin against the doorframe so hard I scream and drop the
knife. Another one wraps around my waist like an animated hawser and
constricts violently. Mo valiantly lends a hand and succeeds in
elbowing me under the chin: I see stars for a second
or two and fumble around with a left hand that feels like a lump of raw
meat for that dropped multitool. There's got to be a better way. If
I've remembered my Gadget Man cigarette lighter … I
reach into my pocket and, instead, find my palmtop. Illumination dawns.

The light of its display is a mycoid green glow
in the darkness. A thousand miles away something is roaring at me.
Icons shimmer, hovering above the screen. I thumb one of them, an ear
with a red line through it, smearing blood across the glass as I cut in
the anti-sound field and pray that it works.

I wake up to discover my
back feels as if the All Blacks have been performing a victory
dance on it, my ankle's been turned on a lathe, and my left hand worked
over with a steak tenderiser. I open my eyes; I'm lying on the floor,
legs stretched out, and Mo is leaning over me. "Are you all right?"
she
asks, in a ragged voice.

"Death shouldn't hurt like this," I croak. I
blink painfully and wonder what the hell happened to her shirt—it
looks
as if it's been used as a nest by a family of hungry ferrets. "It had
you for longer—"

"Once you began hacking at it," she begins, then
pauses to clear her throat. "It let go. Think you can stand up? You
turned that gadget on and the thing just
vanished.
Whipped back
under the door and sort of faded out. Turned translucent and—went
away."

I look round. I'm lying in a sticky black puddle
of something that isn't blood, thankfully—or, at least, not human
blood. The light is normal for a dingy vestibule with an energy-saver
bulb, and the tentacles have gone from the walls. "My phone," I say,
pushing my back up against the wall. "I threw it
out—"

Mo heaves herself upright and staggers to the
front door, bends down and picks something up delicately. "You mean
this?"

She drops it beside me, in about three separate
pieces.

"Fuck. That was meant to call the Plumbers."

"Come upstairs, you'd better explain." She
pauses. "If you think it's safe?"

I try to laugh but a vicious stabbing pain in my
ribs stops me. "I don't think that thing will be coming back any time
soon: I fuzzed its eigenvector but good."

She unlocks the inner door and we stumble up
three flights of stairs, then she opens another door and I somehow end
up slumped across another overstuffed sofa from the Planet of the
Landlords, gasping with pain. She double-locks and deadbolts the door
then flops into an armchair opposite me. "What the hell was that?" she
asks, rubbing her throat.

"That was what we call in the trade an
Unscheduled Reality Excursion, usually abbreviated to 'Oh fuck.' "

"Yes, but—"

"What I said earlier? We live in an
Everett-Wheeler cosmology, all possible parallel universes coexisting.
That thing was an agent someone summoned from elsewhere to, um—"

"Fuck with our metabolic viability," she
suggests.

"Yeah, that." I pause and take stock of my ribs,
ankle, and general frame of mind. My hands are shaking slightly and I
feel clammy and cold with the aftershock, but not entirely out of
control. Good. "You mentioned something about coffee." I lever myself
upright. "If you tell me where it is … "

"Kitchen's over there." I realise there's a
breakfast bar and a cramped cooking niche behind me. I shamble over,
fumble for the light switches, check there's water in the kettle, and
begin scooping instant out of the first available jar. Mo continues:
"My neck hurts. Do you have lots of, uh,
reality excursions in this line of work?"

"That's the first I've ever had follow me home,"
I say truthfully. Fred the Accountant doesn't count.

"Well I am glad to hear that." Mo stands up and
goes somewhere else—bathroom, at a guess; I need the caffeine so badly
that I don't really notice. While the kettle boils I root out a couple
of mugs and some milk, and when I turn round she's back in the armchair
wearing a clean T-shirt. I fill the mugs. "Milk, no sugar. Bathroom's
behind you on the left," she adds, noncommittally.

One splash of water on my face later I'm back on
the sofa with a mug of coffee, beginning to feel a bit more
human—Neanderthal, maybe.

"What was that thing doing here?" she asks me.

"I don't know, and I'm not sure I want to know."

"Really?" She glares at me. "Trouble has a bad
habit of following you around. First time I meet you, an hour later
some Middle Eastern thugs stick me in the trunk of their car, drive me
halfway round Santa Cruz, lock me in a cupboard, and gear up to
sacrifice me. Second time I meet you, an hour later some random bad
dream with too many tentacles ambushes me in my front hall." She
pauses
for a thoughtful moment. "Now granted, you seem to turn up in time to
stop them, but, on the balance of prior probabilities, there appears to
be a statistical correlation between you appearing in my life and
horrible things happening. What's
your
excuse?"

I shrug painfully. "What can I say? There seems
to be a positive correlation in my life between people telling me to
talk to you and horrible things happening to me. I mean, it's not as if
I make a habit of letting random nightmares with too many tentacles
come along on a date, is it? Parenthetically speaking," I add hastily.

"Huh. Well then. Got any ideas as to why this is
happening, Mr. Spy Guy?"

"I am
not
a spy," I say, nettled, "and
the answer—" is right in front of my pointy nose if I'd bloody well
focus on it, I suddenly realise.

"Yes?" she prompts, noticing my pause.

"Those guys who officially didn't abduct you." I
take a sip of coffee and wince; I'm not used to the instant stuff she
uses. "And who weren't officially talking about sacrificing you. I want
you to tell me everything you didn't officially tell anyone who
debriefed you. Like the whole truth."

"What makes you think I didn't tell—" She stops.

"Because you were afraid nobody would believe
you. Because you were afraid they'd think you were a nut. Because there
were no witnesses and nobody wanted to believe anything had happened to
you in the first place because they'd have had to fill in too many
forms in triplicate and that would be bad. Because you didn't owe the
bastards anything for fucking up your life, if you'll excuse my
French." I wave a hand in the general direction of the doorway. "I
believe you. I know something really stinks around here. If I can
figure out what it is, stopping it features high on my list of
priorities. Is that enough for you?"

Mo grimaces, a strikingly ugly expression. "What's to say?"

"Lots. Your call: if you won't tell me what
happened, I can't try and sort things out for you."