The Atrocity Archives (19 page)

I feel like a real shit. Andy told me I would, and Angleton
ground the message home; but it doesn't help any as I tell her half the reasons
why I'm going to Amsterdam—the half she's cleared for.

"The
Rijksmuseum has an interesting basement," I say lightly. "It's off-limits to
civ—to people who don't have need-to-know on the Helsinki Protocols. Thing
is, Holland is part of the EUINTEL agreement, a treaty group that provides for
joint suppression operations directed against paranormal threats. I'm not
allowed to visit the USA on business without a specific invitation, but
Amsterdam is home territory. As long as it's official and I've established a
liaison relationship I can call for backup and expect to get it. And if I want
to examine the basement library, well, it's the best collated set of Ahnenerbe-
SS memorabilia and records this side of Yad Vashem."

"So if you get a
hankering to go look at some old masters and disappear through a side door for a
couple of hours—"

"Exactly."

"Bullshit, Bob." She frowns at
me, eyebrows furrowing. "You've just been lecturing me about the history of this
bunch of Nazi necromancers. You obviously think there's some connection with the
Middle Eastern guys in Santa Cruz, the one with the weird eyes and the German
accent. Your flatmates have just been telling me how safe this house is, and how
all the wards have just been updated. If you're afraid of something, why not
just sit tight at home?"

I shrug. "Well, leaving aside that the bastards
seem to want you for something—I'm not sure. Look, there's some other
stuff I'm not allowed to talk about, but right now Amsterdam looks like the
right place to be, if I want to find these idiots before they try and kidnap you
again."

I pull the grill tray out and slide my garbage pizza onto a
plate. "Slice of pizza?"

"Yes, thank you."

I cut the thing in two
pieces and slide one onto another plate, pass it to her. "Look, there's a
connection between those goons who kidnapped you in Santa Cruz and something my
boss has been keeping an eye on for a couple of years. It turns out that they're
connected to the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police; there's a proliferation
spin on the whole thing, rogue state trying to get its hands on weapons
forbidden by treaty. Right?" She nods, mouth too full to reply. "From that
perspective, kidnapping you makes perfect sense. What I don't understand is the
sacrifice bit. Or the attempt to kill you. It just doesn't make sense if it's
simply a Mukhabarat technology transfer deal. Those guys are vicious but they're
not idiots."

I take a deep breath. "No, the trouble you've got is
something related to the Ahnenerbe-SS's legacy. Which is deep, dark shit. I
wouldn't put it beyond Saddam Hussein to be dealing in such things—the
Ba'ath party of Iraq explicitly modelled their security apparatus on the Third
Reich, and they've got a real down on Jews—but it puzzles me. I mean, the
possessed guy you saw who wasn't in the flat when the Black Chamber SWAT team
stormed it—was he something to do with the Mukhabarat or one of their
proxies summoning up some psychotic Nazi death magic or something? If so, the
question is who they are, and the answer may be buried in the Rijksmuseum
basement. Oh, and there's one other thing."

"Oh? What would that be?"

I can't look her in the eye; I just can't. "My boss says he'd value your
insight. On an informal basis."

Which is only half the truth. What I
really
want to say to her is:
It's you they're after. As long as
you're here in a Laundry safe house they can't get to you. But if we trail you
in front of them, in the middle of a city that happens to be the Mukhabarat's
headquarters for Western Europe, we might be able to draw them out. Get them to
try again, under the guns of a friendly team. Be our tethered goat, Mo?
But
I'm chicken. I don't have the guts to ask her to bait my hook. I hold my tongue
and I feel about six inches tall, and in my imagination I can see Andy and Derek
nodding silent approval, and it still doesn't help. "Given enough pairs of eyes,
all problems are transparent," I say, falling back to platitudes. "Besides, it's
a great city. We could maybe study etchings together, or something."

"You
need to work on your pickup lines," Mo observes, yanking a particularly limp
segment of pizza base loose and holding it up. "But for the sake of argument,
consider me charmed. How much will this trip cost?"

"Ah, now that's the
good bit." I drain my mug and push it away from me. "There aren't many perks
that come from working for the Laundry, but one of them is that it happens to be
possible to get a cheap travel pass. Special arrangement with BA, apparently.
All we have to pay is the airport tax and our hotel bill. Know any decent
B&Bs out there?"

Three days flick by like microfiche cards through the input hopper of
Angleton's Memex. Mo has settled into the vacant
room on the second floor of our safe house like a long-term resident; as a not
very senior academic, her Ph.D. years not long behind her, she probably spent
years in flat-shares like this. I focus on my day-to-day work, fixing broken
network servers, running a security audit of some service department's kit (two
illicit copies of Minesweeper and one MP3 music jukebox to eliminate), and
spending the afternoons up in the secure office in the executive suite, learning
the bible of field operations by heart. I try not to think about what I'm
getting Mo into. In fact, I try not to see her at all, spending long hours into
the evening poring over arcane regulations and petty incantations for
coordinating joint task-force operations. I feel more than a little bit guilty,
even though I'm only obeying orders, and consequently I feel a little bit
depressed.

At least Mhari doesn't try to get in touch.

The Sunday
before we're due to leave I have to stay home because I need to pack my bags.
I'm dithering over a stack of T-shirts and an electric toothbrush when someone
knocks on my bedroom door. "Bob?"

I open it. "Mo."

She steps
inside, hesitant, eyes scanning. My room often has that effect on people. It's
not the usual single male scattering of clothes on every available
surface—aggravated by my packing—so much as the groaning, double-stacked
bookcase and the stuff on the walls. Not many guys have anatomically
correct life-sized plastic skeletons hanging from a wall bracket. Or a desk made
out of Lego bricks, with the bits of three half-vivisected computers humming and
chattering to each other on top of it.

"Are you packing?" she asks,
smiling brightly at me; she's dressed up for a night out with some lucky
bastard, and here's me wondering when I last changed my T-shirt and looking
forward to a close encounter with a slice of toast and a tin of baked beans. But
the embarrassment only lasts for a moment, until her wandering gaze settles in
the direction of the bookcase. Then: "Is that a copy of Knuth?" She homes in on
the top shelf. "Hang on—volume
four
? But he only finished the first
three volumes in that series! Volume four's been overdue for the past twenty
years!"

"Yup." I nod, smugly. Whoever she's dating won't have anything
like
that
on his shelves. "We—or the Black Chamber—have a
little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of
The Art of
Computer Programming
, and they don't render him metabolically challenged. At
least, he doesn't publish it to the public; it's the one with the Turing Theorem
in it. Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extradimensional Summoning. This is a very
limited edition—numbered and classified."

"That's—" She
frowns. "May I borrow it? To read?"

"You're on the inside now; just don't
leave it on the bus."

She pulls the book down, shoves a bundle of
crumpled jeans to one side of my bed to make room, and perches on the end of it.
Mo in dress-up mode turns out to be a grownup designer version of hippie crossed
with Goth: black velvet skirt, silver bangles, ethnic top. Not quite
self-consciously pre-Raphaelite, but nearly. Right now she's destroying the effect
completely by being 100 percent focussed on the tome. "Wow." Her eyes are
alight. "I just wanted to see if you were, like, getting ready? Only now I don't
want to go; I'm going to be up all night!"

"Just remember we need to be
out the door by seven o'clock," I remind her. "Allow two hours for getting to
Luton and check in … "

"I'll sleep on the plane." She
closes the book and puts it down, but keeps one hand on the cover, protectively
close. "I haven't seen you around much, Bob. Been busy?"

"More than you
can imagine," I say. Setting up scanners that will slurp through the Laundry's
UPI and Reuters news feeds and page me if anything interesting comes up while
I'm away. Reading the manual for field operations. Avoiding my guilty
conscience … "How about you?"

She pulls a face.
"There's so
much
stuff buried in the stacks, it's unbelievable. I've been
spending all my time reading, getting indigestion along the way. It's just such
a waste—all that stuff, locked up behind the Official Secrets Act!"

"Yeah, well." It's my turn to pull a face now. "In principle, I kind of agree
with you. In practice … how to put it? This stuff has
repercussions. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set;
play around with it for too long and horrible things can happen to you." I
shrug. "And you know what students are like."

"Yes, well." She stands up,
straightening her skirt with one hand and holding the book with the other. "I
suppose you've got more experience of that than I have. But, well." She pauses,
and gives a little half-smile: "I was wondering if, if you'd eaten yet?"

Ah. Suddenly I figure it out: I'm
so
thick. "Give me half an hour?" I
ask.
Where the hell did I leave that shirt?
"Anywhere in particular take
your fancy?"

"There's a little bistro on the high street that I was
meaning to check out. If you're ready in half an hour?"

"Downstairs," I say firmly. "Half an hour!" She slips out of my room
and I waste half a minute drooling at the back of the door before I snap out of
it and go in search of something to wear that doesn't look too shop-soiled. The
sudden realisation that Mo might actually enjoy my company is a better
antidepressant than anything I could get on a prescription.

I'm brought to my senses by the shrill of my alarm clock:
it's eight in the morning, the sky's still dark outside, my head aches, and I'm
feeling inexplicably happy for someone who this afternoon will be baiting the
trap for an unknown enemy.

I pull on my clothes, grab my bags, head
downstairs still yawning vigorously. Mo is in the kitchen, red-eyed and nursing
a mug of coffee; there's a huge, travel-stained backpack in the hall. "Been up
all night with the book?" I ask. She was thinking about it all through what was
otherwise a really enjoyable quiet night out.

"Here. Help yourself." She
points to the cafetière. She yawns. "This is
all
your fault."
I glance at her in time to catch a brief grin. "Ready to go?"

"After
this." I pour a mug, add milk, shudder, yawn again, and begin to work on it.
"Somehow I'm not hungry this morning."

"I think that place goes on the
visit-again list," she agrees. "I must try the couscous next
time … " She mounts another attack on her mug and I decide
that she's just as attractive wearing jeans and sweat shirt and no warpaint
first thing in the morning as in the evening. I'll pass on the red eyes, though.
"Got your passport?"

"Yeah. And the tickets. Shall we go?"

"Lead
on."

Some hours later we've emerged from Arrivals at Schiphol, caught the
train to the Centraal Station, grappled with the trams, and checked into a
cutesy family-run hotel with a theme of hot and cold running
philosophers—Hegel on the breakfast room place mats, Mo in the Plato room
on the top floor, and myself relegated to the Kant basement. By early afternoon
we're walking in the Vondelpark, between the dark green grass and the overcast
grey sky; a cool wind is blowing in off the channel and for the first time I'm
able to get the traffic fumes out of my lungs. And we're out of sight of Nick
and Alan who, until the hotel, tailed us all the way from the safe house to the
airport and then onto our flight—I suppose they're part of the
surveillance team. It's bad practice to acknowledge their presence and they made
no attempt to talk to me; as far as I can tell, Mo doesn't suspect anything.

"So where is this museum then?" asks Mo.

"Right there." I point. At
one end of the park, a neoclassical lump of stonework rears itself pompously
toward the sky. "Let's check in and get our restricted area passes validated,
huh? Give it an hour or so and we can try and find somewhere to eat."

"Only a couple of hours?"

"Everywhere closes early in Amsterdam,
except the bars and coffee shops," I explain. "But don't go in a coffee shop and
order a coffee or they'll laugh at you. What we call a café is an
Eethuis
, and what they call a café we call a pub. Got it?"

"Clear as mud." She shakes her head. "Good thing for me everyone seems to
speak English."

"It's a common affliction." I pause. "Just don't let it
make you feel too secure. This isn't a safe house."

We walk past a
verdigris-covered statue while she considers this. "You have another agenda for
coming here," she says finally.

My guts feel cold. "Yes," I admit. I've
been dreading this moment.

"Well." Unexpectedly she reaches out and takes
my hand. "I assume you're prepared for the shit to hit the fan, right?"

"All feco-ventilatory intersections are covered. They assure me."

"They."
She shrugs, uncomfortably. "This was
their idea?"