The Atrocity Archives (2 page)

I squish through the damp grass and find the
designated window. Like the briefing said, it's shut but not locked. A
good tug and the window hinges out toward me. It's inconveniently high
up, a good four feet above the concrete gutter. I pull myself up and
over the sill, sending a tiny avalanche of disks scuttering across the
floor. The room is ghostly green except for the bright hot spots of
powered-down monitors and fans blowing air from hot CPU cases. I
stumble forward over a desk covered in piles of kipple, wondering how
in hell the owner is going to fail to notice my great muddy boot-print
between the obviously confidential documents scattered next to a
keyboard and a stone-cold coffee mug. Then I'm on the floor in the QA
department, and the clock is ticking.

The pager vibrates again.
SITREP
.
I pull my mobile out of my breast pocket and dial a three-digit number,
then put it back again. Just letting them know I've arrived and
everything's running smoothly. Typical Laundry—they'll actually
include
the phone bill in the event log to prove I called in on schedule before
they file it somewhere secret. Gone are the days of the impromptu
black-bag job … 

The offices of Memetix (UK) Ltd. are a typical
cubicle hell: anonymous beige fabric partitions dividing up little
slices of corporate life. The photocopier hulks like an altar beneath a
wall covered with devotional scriptures—the company's code of conduct,
lists of compulsory employee self-actualization training courses, that
sort of thing. I glance around, hunting cubicle D14. There's a mass of
Dilbert cartoons pinned to the side of his partition, spoor of a mildly
rebellious mind-set; doubtless middle managers prowl
round the warren before any visit from the upper echelons, tearing down
such images that signal dissent. I feel a minor shiver of sympathy
coming on: Poor bastard, what must it be like to be stuck here in the
warren of cells at the heart of the new industrial revolution, never
knowing where the lightning's going to strike next?

There's a desk with three monitors on it: two
large but otherwise ordinary ones, and a weird-ass piece of machinery
that looks at least a decade old, dredged out of the depths of the
computer revolution. It's probably an old Symbolics Lisp machine or
something. It tweaks my antique gland, but I don't have time to
rubberneck; the security guard's due to make another round in just
sixteen minutes. There are books leaning in crazy piles and drifts on
either side: Knuth, Dijkstra, Al-Hazred, other less familiar names. I
pull his chair back and sit down, wrinkling my nose. In one of the desk
drawers something's died and gone to meet its maker.

Keyboard: check. Root account: I pull out the
filched S/Key smartcard the Laundry sourced from one of Memetix's
suppliers and type the response code to the system's challenge.
(One-time passwords are a bitch to crack; once again, give thanks to
the Laundry's little helpers.) Then I'm logged in and trusted and it's
time to figure out just what the hell I'm logged in
to
.

Malcolm—whose desk I sit at, and whose keyboard
I pollute—is running an ant farm: there are dead computers under the
desk, scavenged for parts, and a dubious Frankenstein server—guts open
to the elements—humming like a generator beside it. For a moment I
hunt
around in panic, searching for silver pentacles and glowing runes under
the desktop—but it's clean. Logged in, I find myself in a maze of
twisty little automounted filesystems, all of them alike.
Fuck shit
curse dammit,
I recite under my breath; it was never like this in
Cast
a Deadly Spell.
I pull out the phone and dial.

"Capital Laundry Services, how may we help you?"

"Give me a hostname and target directory, I'm in
but I'm lost."

"One sec … try 'auto slash
share slash fs slash scooby slash netapp slash user slash home slash
malcolm slash uppercase-R slash catbert slash
world-underscore-domination slash manifesto.' "

I type so fast my fingers trip over each other.
There's a faint clicking as the server by the desk mounts scooby's
gigantic drive array and scratches its read/write heads, looking for
what has got to be one of the most stupidly named files anywhere on the
company's intranet.

"Hold on … yup, got it." I
view the sucker and it's there in plaintext:
Some Notes Toward a
Proof of Polynomial Completeness in Hamiltonian Networks.
I page
through the text rapidly, just skimming; there's no time to give it my
full in-depth attention, but it looks genuine. "Bingo." I can feel an
unpleasant slimy layer of sweat in the small of my back. "I've got it.
Bye for now."

"Bye yourself." I shut the phone and stare at
the paper. Just for a moment, I hesitate … What I'm
here to do isn't fair, is it? The imp of perversity takes over: I bang
out a quick command, mailing the incriminating file to a not-so-dead
personal account. (Figure I'll read it later.) Then it's time to nuke
the server. I unmount the netapp drive and set fire to it with a
bitstorm of low-level reformatting. If Malcolm wants his paper back
he'll have to enlist GCHQ and a scanning tunneling microscope to find
it under all the 0xDEADBEEF spammed across the hard disk platters.

My pager buzzes again.
SITREP
.
I hit three more digits on the phone. Then I edge out of the cubicle
and scramble back across the messy desk and out into the cool spring
night, where I peel off those damned latex gloves and waggle my fingers
at the moon.

I'm so elated that I don't even remember the
stack of disks I sent flying until I'm getting off the night bus at
home. And by then, the imp of perversity is chuckling up his sleeve.

I'm fast asleep in bed when the cellphone rings.

It's in my jacket pocket, where I left it last
night, and I thrash around on the floor for a bit while it chirps
merrily. "Hello?"

"Bob?"

It's Andy. I try not to groan. "What time is it?"

"It's nine-thirty. Where are you?"

"In bed. What's—"

"Thought you were going to be in at the debrief?
When can you come in?"

"I'm not feeling too wonderful. Got home at
about two-thirty. Let me think … eleven good
enough?"

"It'll have to be." He sounds burned. Well, Andy
wasn't the one freezing his butt off in the woods last night, was he?
"See you there." The implicit
or else
doesn't need
enunciating.
Her Majesty's Extra-Secret Service has never really been clear on the
concept of flexitime and sensible working hours.

I shamble into the bathroom and stare at the
thin rind of black mold growing around the window as I piss. I'm alone
in the house; everyone else is either out—working—or
out
—gone
for good. (That's out, as in working, for Pinky and the Brain;
out
,
as in fucked off, for Mhari.) I pick up my senescent toothbrush and
perform the usual morning ritual. At least the heating's on. Downstairs
in the kitchen I fill a percolator with nuclear-caffeinated grounds and
nudge it onto the gas ring. I figure I can make it into the Laundry by
eleven and still have time to wake up first. I'll need to be alert for
that meeting. Did last night go off properly, or not? Now that I can't
do anything about them I remember the disks.

Nameless dread is all very well when you're
slumped in front of the TV watching a slasher movie, but it plays havoc
with your stomach when you drop half a pint of incredibly strong black
coffee on it in the space of fifteen
minutes. Brief nightmarish scenarios flit through my head, in order of
severity: written reprimands, unemployment, criminal prosecution for
participating in a black-bag job for which authorisation is
unaccountably retroactively withdrawn; worst of all, coming home to
find Mhari curled up on the living room sofa again. Scratch that latter
vision; the short-lived sadness gives way to a deeper sense of relief,
tempered by a little loneliness. The loneliness of the long-distance
spook? Damn, I need to get my head in order. I'm no James Bond, with a
sexy KGB minx trying to seduce me in every hotel room. That's about the
first thing they drum into you at Capital Laundry Services ("Washes
cleaner than clean!"): life is not a spy movie, work is not romantic,
and there's nothing particularly exciting about the job. Especially
when it involves freezing your balls off in a corporate shrubbery at
eleven o'clock on a rainy night.

Sometimes I regret not having taken the
opportunity to study accountancy. Life could be so much more fun if I'd
listened to the right recruiting spiel at the university milk
round … but I need the money, and maybe one of these
days they'll let me do something interesting. Meanwhile I'm here in
this job because all the alternatives are worse.

So I go to work.

The London Underground is
famous for apparently believing that human beings go about this
world owning neither kidney nor colon. Not many people know that
there's precisely one public toilet in Mornington Crescent station. It
isn't signposted, and if you ask for it the staff will shake their
heads; but it's there all the same, because we asked for it.

I catch the Metropolitan line to Euston
Square—sharing a squalid rattle-banging cattle car with a herd of
bored
commuters—then switch to the Northern line. At the next stop I get
out,
shuffle up the staircase, go into the gents, and step
into the right-hand rear stall. I yank
up
on the toilet handle
instead of down, and the back wall opens like a big thick door
(plumbing and all), ushering me into the vestibule. It's all a bit like
a badly funded B-movie remake of some sixties Hollywood spy thriller. A
couple of months ago I asked Boris why we bothered with it, but he just
chuckled and told me to ask Angleton—meaning, "Bugger off."

The wall closes behind me and a hidden solenoid
bolt unlocks the stall door: the toilet monster consumes another
victim. I put my hand in the ID scanner, collect my badge from the slot
next to it, and step across the red line on the threshold. It's another
working day at Capital Laundry Services, discreet cleaning agents to
the government.

And guess who's in hot water?

First stop: my office. If you can call it an
office—it's a sort of niche between a row of lockers and a herd of
senile filing cabinets, into which the Facilities gnomes have jammed a
plywood desk and a swivel chair with a damaged gas strut. I drop my
coat and jacket on the chair and my computer terminal whistles at me:
YOU HAVE MAIL
. No shit, Sherlock, I
always
have mail. It's an existential thing: if I don't have mail it would
mean that something is very wrong with the world, or maybe I've died
and gone to bureaucratic hell. (I'm a child of the wired generation,
unlike some of the suits hereabouts who have their secretaries print
everything out and dictate their replies for an audio-typist to send.)
There is also a cold, scummy cup of over-milked coffee on my desk;
Marcia's been over-efficient again. A yellow Post-it note curls
reproachfully atop one of my keyboards:
MEETING
9:30AM CT ROOM B4
. Hell and damnation, why didn't I remember?

I go to meeting room B4.

There's a red light showing so I knock and wave
my badge before entering, just in case Security is paying attention.
Inside, the air is blue; it looks like Andy's been chain-smoking his
foul French fags for the past couple of hours. "Yo," I say. "Everyone
here?"

Boris the Mole looks at me stonily. "You're
late."

Harriet shakes her head. "Never mind." She taps
her papers into a neat stack. "Had a good sleep, did we?"

I pull out a chair and slump into it. "I spent
six hours being one with a shrubbery last night. There were three
cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs."

Andy stubs out his cigarette and sits up. "Well,
now we're here … " He looks at Boris enquiringly.
Boris nods. I try to keep a straight face: I hate it when the old guard
start playing stiff upper lip.

"Jackpot." Andy grins at me. I nearly have a
heart attack on the spot. "You're coming to the pub tonight, Bob.
Drinks on me. That was a straight A for results, C-plus for fieldwork,
overall grade B for execution."

"Uh, I thought I made a mess going in—"

"No. If it hadn't been a semicovert you'd have
had to burn your shoes, but apart from that—well. Zero witnesses, you
found the target, there's nothing left, and Dr. Denver is about to find
himself downsized and in search of a job somewhere less sensitive." He
shakes his head. "Not a lot more to say, really."

"But the security guard could have—"

"The security guard was fully aware there was
going to be a burglary, Bob. He wasn't going to move an inch, much less
see anything untoward or sound the alarm, lest spooks come out of the
woodwork and find him crunchy and good with ketchup."

"It was a set-up?" I say disbelievingly.

Boris nods at me. "Is a
good
set-up."

"Was it worth it?" I ask. "I mean, I just wiped
out some poor bastard's last six months of work—"

Boris sighs mournfully and shoves an official
memo at me. It's got a red-and-yellow chevron-striped border and the
phrase
MOST SECRET DESTROY BEFORE READING
stamped across its cover. I open it and look at the title page:
Some
Notes Toward a Proof of Polynomial Completeness in Hamiltonian Networks.
And a subtitle:
Formal Correctness Report.
One of the
departmental theorem-proving oracles has been
busy overnight. "He duplicated the Turing result?"

"Most regrettably," says Boris.

Harriet nods. "You want to know if last night
was worth it. It was. If you hadn't succeeded, we might have had to
take more serious measures. That's always an option, you know, but in
general we try to handle such affairs at the lowest possible level."