The Atrocity Archives (32 page)

Harriet's smile slips first. "I'm your team
leader," she says sternly. "You aren't in a position to tell me what
I
need to know."

"
Fuck
that." I stand up. "Minute this, if
you're going to start writing it down: I want it noted that I deny all
accusations, that my actions are justified. I am not going to be party
to a procedural lynch mob held on spurious grounds. You don't have need
to know and I don't have permission to tell you. If you want to take
this further I insist that you take it up with Angleton."

"Angleton—" Now Bridget's smile has slipped,
too. Eric is blinking rapidly, confused. I pick on him.

"Let's put this on Angleton's desk," I say
soothingly. "He'll know what to do with it."

"If you say so—" Eric looks uncertain. He's been
around so long that he doesn't have to imagine
the reasons behind Angleton's mystique: he
knows.
He almost
looks afraid.

"Come on."

I grab the papers off the table, yank the door
open and march out. Behind me, Bridget protests: "You can't!"

"I bloody can," I snarl over my shoulder,
speeding up to a trot as I head for his basement lair. "You bloody see
if I can!" I've got a fistful of accusations and a startled Harriet
flapping after me: that's all I need. Fucking departmental politics,
see where it gets you.

Angleton's outer vestibule; the door gapes open.
I barge right in, startling the spotty young geek who's threading
microfilm between the Memex's rollers. "Boss!" I call.

The inner door swings open. "Howard. We were
just discussing you. Enter."

I slide to a halt on the green carpet, in front
of the great olive-coloured metal desk. I hold up the papers. "Bridget
and Harriet," I say. "Oh, and Eric."

Andy leans against the wall next to Angleton's
desk and whistles quietly. "You sure know how to make friends and
influence people."

"Silence, please." Angleton leans forward, "Ms.
Brody. May I ask what you're trying to pin on our young friend here?"

Bridget parks herself on the other side of the
desk from Angleton, and leans over him. "Violation of departmental
procedures. Security breaches. Misuse of Internet access. Poor
timekeeping. Absence without official leave. Breach of protocol and
abusive behaviour toward a superior amounting to gross misconduct."

"I … see." Angleton's voice
is cold enough to freeze liquid hydrogen.

Out of the corner of my eye I find Andy trying
to catch my eye. He seems to be twitching his cheek in Morse
code—telling me to keep my mouth shut.

"He's a loose cannon," Bridget insists, in a
Thatcheresque tone of total conviction. "He's a
menace. Can't even fill out a time sheet accurately."

"Ms. Brody." Angleton leans back, looking up at
Bridget across the expanse of his desk.
That's odd, why is he
relaxing?
I wonder.

He holds something up. "You appear to have
overlooked something." The thing in his hand is small and walnut
coloured: a tuft of hair sticks out of one end of it, bristly and dry.
Bridget inhales sharply. "Howard works for me now. He's on your budget
allocation, I agree, but he works for
me,
and you will
henceforth confine your relationship with him to issuing monthly
payslips and ensuring that his office is not accidentally re-allocated,
unless you wish to wind up emulating the fate of your illustrious
predecessor." He jiggles the thing in his hand.

Bridget's eyes are fixed on the thing. She
swallows. "You wouldn't."

"My dear, I assure you that I am an
equal-opportunity executioner. Eric!" The elderly security officer
shuffles forward. "Please remove Ms. Brody from my office before she
makes me say something I might regret."

"You
bastard,"
she snarls, as Eric
places a hand on her shoulder and urges her away from the room. "Just
because you think you can go outside channels and talk to the director,
don't let that fool you—"

The door shuts behind her. Angleton puts the
wizened thing down on his blotter. "Do you think I'm bluffing,
Robert?"
he asks me, his tone deceptively mild.

I swallow. "Uh-uh. No way. Never."

"Good." He smiles at the shrunken head before
him. "Something the pen-pushers never seem to get straight: don't
threaten, don't bluff. Isn't that right, Wallace?"

The shrunken head seems to nod, or maybe it's
just my imagination. I take a deep breath. "Actually, I was meaning to
see you. It's about Alan."

Angleton nods. "He took five hundred rems, boy.
They tell me that ten years ago that would
probably have been fatal."

"Has anyone told Hillary yet?"

Andy coughs. "I'm going round there in a couple
of hours." My expression must be sceptical because he adds, "Who do
you
think was best man at their wedding?"

"Oh. Okay." 1 feel an enormous letdown, as if
some tension I'd barely been aware of has been released. "Well, then.
That's the main thing."

"Not really."

I glance back at Angleton. "There's more?"

"Bad timekeeping." He looks contemplative. "So
you visited Alan first off, then came in to work. I'd say you've done a
full day's work today already, Howard. Better go home before you're too
late."

"Home?" Then I realise. "How long has she been
back?"

"Two days." His cheek twitches. "Better hope she
isn't angry with you."

As I stick the key in the
front door lock, I look up at the roofline—both infinitely
familiar and strangely alien.
I've only been away one week,
I
tell myself.
What can have changed?

The front hall is full of petite tank tracks.
They're about twenty centimetres wide, covered in dried-up mud, and
they run past the hulking Victorian coat rack and the living room door
to stop just short of the kitchen. I stumble between them as I close
the outer and inner doors, try to find somewhere to stow my bag that
isn't covered in leftovers from the retreat from Moscow, and remove my
coat.

There's most of an engine block on the kitchen
table. Whoever put it there for dissection had the good sense to spread
a couple of copies of the
Independent
under it; a headline
peeps out from under one oily corner: AMSTERDAM HOTEL GAS BLAST KILLS
FOUR. Yeah, right. Depression crashes down on me
like a black tide: I suddenly feel very ancient, old beyond my years'
span in centuries. The kitchen sink is full of unwashed dishes; I turn
on the hot tap and swirl it around in search of a mug that's more or
less cleanable, then go rummage in my cupboard for some tea bags.

A new crop of bills has sprouted in the fertile
soil of the cork notice board. I'll have to read them sooner or
later—later will do.

There's a small pile of letters with my name on
them in the usual place—half of them look to be junk mail, judging by
the glossy envelopes. And there's no water in the kettle. I fill it,
then sit down next to the engine block and wait for enlightenment to
spring on me. I am, I realise, tired; also depressed, lonely, and
afraid. Until a couple of months ago I never saw anyone die; for the
past couple of nights I haven't been able to dream about anything else.
It's exhausting, physically and emotionally. One of the doctors said
something about stress disorders but I wasn't listening properly at the
time. I wonder if the engine block belongs to Pinky or Brains: I've got
a mind to give them a chewing out over it when they come home. It's
antisocial as hell—what if someone wanted to eat lunch in here?

The kettle boils, then clicks off. I sit in
silence for a moment, feeling a chill in the air, then stand up to pour
a mug of tea.

"Make one for me, too?"

I nearly scald myself but control the kettle in
time. "I didn't hear you come in."

"That's okay." She moves a chair behind me. "I
didn't hear you come in, either. Been back long?"

"Back in the country?" I'm rummaging in the sink
for another mug as my mouth freewheels without human intervention,
seemingly autonomous, as if it isn't a part of me. "Only since this
morning. I had to visit Alan in hospital first, then I went in to work
for a couple of hours. Been in meetings. They've kept me in meetings
ever since … "

"Did they tell you not to talk about it—to
anybody?" she asks. I detect a note of strain in her voice.

"Not … exactly." I rinse the
mug, drop a tea bag in it, pour on hot water, put it down, and turn
round to face her. Mo looks the way I feel: hair askew, clothes
slept-in, eyes haunted. "I can talk to you about it, if you like.
You're cleared for this by default." I drag another chair out from the
table. She drops into it without asking. "Did they tell you what was
going on?"

"I—" she shakes her head. "Tethered goat." She
sounds faintly disgusted, but her face is a mask. "Is it over?"

I sit down next to her. "Yes. Definitely and
forever. It's not going to happen again." I can see her relaxing. "Is
that what you wanted to hear?"

She looks at me sharply. "As long as it's the
truth."

"It is." I look at the engine block gloomily. "Whose is this?"

She sighs. "I think it belongs to Brains. He
brought it home yesterday; I don't know where he got it from."

"I'm going to have words with him."

"Won't be necessary; he said he's going to take
it away when he moves out."

"What?"

I must look puzzled, because she frowns: "I
forgot. Pinky and Brains are moving out. By the end of the week. I only
found out yesterday, when I got back."

"Oh great." I glance at the collection of
papers, pinned like butterflies to the corkboard: there's nothing like
a change of flatmates to induce feelings of fear and loathing over the
phone bill. "That's kind of short notice."

"I think it's been brewing for some time," she
says quietly. "He said something about your
attitude … " She trails off. "Hard to live with, so
they're going to leave you to your cosy domesticity, unquote." Her
eyes
sparkle for a moment, angry and hard. "Know any sensitivity training
camps with watchtowers and armed guards? I think he could do with an
enforced vacation."

"Him and my line manager, both. At least, my old
manager." The mugs of tea have been brewing long enough; I fish the
bags out and add milk. "Here. You didn't tell me what else you've been
doing."

"Doing?" She stares at me. "I've been passed
around in a pressurised plastic sack by a bunch of soldiers, poked and
prodded by doctors, grilled by security officers, and packed off home
like a naughty little girl. I haven't exactly done much
doing
,
if you follow. In fact—" She shakes her head in disgust. "Forget
it."

"I can't." I can't meet her eyes, either. I'm
staring at a cooling mug of tea, and all I can see are worms of pale
light, writhing slowly. "I think this was important, Mo. To people
other than us, people who'll sleep better at night now."

"Why. Me." She's gritting her teeth; platitudes
won't work.

"Because you were there," I say tiredly. "Because someone in your
town was trying to carry out a petty act of
terrorism, and summoned up an ancient evil they couldn't control.
Because you were close and were thinking the unthinkable on a regular,
professional basis. A mind is a dangerous thing to taste, and
sometimes—only sometimes—things come out of the woodwork that like
the
flavour of our thoughts. This particular thing was relying on our
stupidity, or on our failure to recognise what it was, and used you as
bait to sucker us in. We thought
we
were using
you
as
bait, but all the time it was playing us like a fish on a line. In the
end, at least five people died because of that mistake, and another is
in hospital right now and maybe isn't going to make it."

"Thanks." Her tone of voice is like granite. "Whose mistake was
it?"

"Committee decision." I put my mug down and look
at her. "If we hadn't come after you, those other guys would still be
alive. So I guess, from a purely utilitarian point of view everyone in
the Laundry fucked up, all the way down the line, from start to finish.
I shouldn't have come after you in Santa Cruz: end of story."

"Is that what you really think?" she asks,
wonderingly.

I shake my head. "Sometimes we make mistakes for
all the right reasons. If Angleton had run this according to the book,
by our wonderful ISO-9000-compliant recipe for intelligence operations
in the occult sphere, you'd be dead—and the ice giant would still have
come through. We'd
all
have been dead, soon enough."

"Angleton broke the rules? I didn't think he was
the type. Dried-up old bureaucrat."

"A vintage that sometimes isn't what it seems."

She stands up. "Why were
you
there?" she
asks.

I shrug. "Did you expect me to leave you?"

She looks at me for a moment that feels like
eternity. "I didn't know you long enough to guess the answer to that,
before. Funny what a crisis teaches you about other people." She holds
out a hand. "Brains probably isn't going to get back until seven and I
need to go back to my flat in half an hour; give me a hand moving this
thing off the table?" She gestures at the engine block.

"Guess so. Um, what are you planning on doing,
if I may be so bold?"

"Doing?" She pauses with one hand on the
Kettenkrad engine block: "I'm moving the rest of my stuff into
Brains's
room once he's gone. You didn't think you could get rid of me that
easily, did you?" She grins, suddenly. "Want to help me pack?"

The death rattle of a
mortally wounded telephone is a horrible thing to hear at four
o'clock on a Tuesday morning. It's even worse when you're sleeping the
sleep that follows a pitcher of iced margueritas in the basement of the
Dog's Bollocks, with a chaser of nachos and a tequila slammer or three
for dessert. I come to, sitting upright, bare-ass naked in the middle
of the wooden floor, clutching the receiver with one hand and my head
with the other—purely to prevent it from exploding, you
understand—and
moaning quietly. "Who is it?" I croak into the microphone.