The Atrocity Archives (42 page)

"Oh-ho, Robert! I was wondering where you were.
Are you trying to pull a sickie again?"

"No, I'm not," I say, taking a deep breath. "I
need to talk to Boris urgently, Harriet, is he around?"

"Oh, I couldn't possibly say. That would be
disclosing information prejudicial to the good running of the
department over a public network connection, and I couldn't possibly
encourage you to do that when you can bloody well show
your face in the office for the meeting we scheduled the day before
yesterday, remember that?"

I feel as if my guts have turned to ice. "Which
meeting?" I ask.

"The software audit, remember? You never read
the agenda for meetings. If you did, you might have taken an interest
in the
any other business
 … Where
are
you calling from, Bob? Anyone would think you didn't work
here … "

"I want to talk to Boris. Right now." The
graunching noise in the background is my jaw clenching. "It's
urgent,
Harriet. To do with the code blue the other day. Now you can get him
right now or you can regret it later, which is your choice?"

"Oh, I don't think that'll be necessary," she
says in what I can only describe as a gloating tone of voice. "After
missing the meeting, you and your precious Counter-Possession Unit will
be divisional history, and you'll have only yourselves to blame!
Goodbye." And the bitch hangs up on me.

I look round and see both Andy and Angleton
staring at me. "She hung up," I say stupidly. "Fucking Harriet has a
diversion on Boris's line. It's a setup. Something about making an end
run around the CPU."

"Then we shall have to attend this meeting in
person," Angleton says, briskly marching toward the front
doors, which
bend aside to get out of his way. "Follow me!"

We proceed directly to the helicopter, which has
kept its engines idling while we've been inside. It's only taken, what?
Three or four minutes since Angleton arrived? I see another figure
heading toward us across the car park—a figure in a grey trouser suit,
slightly stained, a wild look in her eyes. "Hey, you!"
she shouts. "I
want some answers!"

Angleton turns to me. "Yours?" I nod. He beckons
to her imperiously. "Come with us," he calls, raising
his voice over
the whine of gathering turbines. Past her shoulder I see one of the
fake firemen lowering a kit-bag that had been, purely coincidentally,
pointed at DI Sullivan's back. "This bit I always
dislike," he adds in
a low monotone, his face set in a grim expression of disapproval. "The
fewer lives we warp, the better."

I half-consider asking him to explain what he
means, but he's already climbing into the rear compartment of the
chopper and Andy is following him. I give Josephine a hand up as the
blades overhead begin to turn and the engines rise in a full-throated
bellowing duet. I get my headset on in time to hear Angleton's orders:
"Back to London, and don't spare the horses."

The Laundry is infamous for its grotesque
excesses in the name of accounting; budgetary infractions are punished
like war crimes, and mere paper clips can bring down the wrath of dead
alien gods on your head. But when Angleton says
don't spare the
horses
he sends us screaming across the countryside at a hundred
and forty miles per hour, burning aviation fuel by the ton and getting
ATC to clear lower priority traffic out of our way—and all because he
doesn't want to be late for a meeting. There's a police car waiting for
us at the pad, and we cut through the chaotic London traffic incredibly
fast, almost making it into third gear at times.

"McLuhan's got SCORPION STARE," I tell Angleton
round the curve of Andy's shoulder. "And headquarters's
security cams
are all wired. If he primes them before we get back there, we could
find a lockout—or worse. It all depends on what Harriet and her boss
have been planning."

"We will just have to see." Angleton nods very
slightly, his facial expression rigid. "Do you still have your
lucky
charm?"

"Had to use it." I'd shrug, if there was more
room. "What do you think Bridget's up to?"

"I couldn't possibly comment." I'd take
Angleton's dismissal as a put-down, but he points his chin at the man
in the driver's seat. "When we get there, Bob, I want you to go
in
through the warehouse door and wake the caretaker. You have your mobile
telephone?"

"Uh, yeah," I say, hoping like hell that the
battery hasn't run down.

"Good. Andrew. You and I will enter through the
front door. Bob, set your telephone to vibrate. When you receive a
message from me, you will know it is time to have the janitor switch
off the main electrical power.
And
the backup power."

"Oops." I lick my suddenly dry lips, thinking of
all the electrical containment pentacles in the basement and all the
computers plugged into the filtered and secured circuit on the other
floors. "All hell's going to break loose if I do that."

"That's what I'm counting on." The bastard
smiles
,
and despite all the horrible sights I've seen today so far, I hope most
of all that I never see it again before the day I die.

"Hey, what about me?" Angleton glances at the
front seat with a momentary flash of irritation. Josephine stares right
back, clearly angry and struggling to control it. "I'm your
liaison
officer for North Buckinghamshire," she says, "and I'd
really
like
to know who I'm liaising with, especially as you seem to have left a
few
bodies
on my manor that I'm going to have to bury, and this
jerk"—she means me, I am distraught! Oh, the
ignominy!—"promised me
you'd have the answers."

Angleton composes himself. "There are no
answers, madam, only further questions," he says, and just for
a second
he sounds like a pious wanker of a vicar going through the motions of
comforting the bereaved. "And if you want the answers you'll
have to go
through the jerk's filing cabinet."
Bastard.
Then
there's a
flashing sardonic grin, dry as the desert sands in June: "Do
you want
to help prevent any, ah, recurrence of what you saw an hour ago? If so,
you may accompany the jerk and attempt to keep him from dying."
He
reaches out a hand and drops a ragged slip of paper over her shoulder.
"You'll need this."

Provisional warrant card, my oh my.
Josephine mutters something unkind about his ancestry, barnyard
animals, and lengths of rubber hose. I pretend not to hear because
we're about three minutes out, stuck behind a
slow-moving but gregarious herd of red double-decker buses, and I'm
trying to remember the way to the janitor's office in the Laundry main
unit basement and whether there's anything I'm likely to trip over in
the dark.

"Excuse me for asking, but how many corpses do you usually run into
in the course of your job?" I ask.

"Too many, since you showed up." We turn the
street corner into a brick-walled alley crowded by wheelie bins and
smelling of vagrant piss. "But since you ask, I'm a detective
inspector. You get to see lots of vile stuff on the beat."

Something in her expression tells me I'm on
dangerous ground here, but I persist: "Well, this is the
Laundry. It's
our job to deal with seven shades of vile shit so that people like you
don't have to." I take a deep breath. "And before we go
in I figured I
should warn you that you're going to think Fred and Rosemary West work
for us, and Harold Shipman's the medical officer." At this
point she
goes slightly pale—the Demon DIYers and Dr. Death are the acme of
British serial killerdom after all—but she doesn't flinch.

"And you're the
good
guys?"

"Sometimes I have my doubts," I sigh.

"Well, join the club." I have a feeling she's
going to make it, if she lives through the next hour.

"Enough bullshit.
This
is the street
level entrance to the facilities block under Headquarters Building One.
You saw what those fuckers did with the cameras at the car pound and
Site Able. If my guess is straight, they're going to do it all over
again
here
—or worse. From here there's a secure line to
several
of the Met's offices, including various borough-level control systems,
such as the Camden Town control centre. SCORPION STARE isn't ready for
nationwide deployment—"

"What the
hell
would justify that?" she
demands, eyes wide.

"You do not have clearance for that
information." Amazing how easily the phrase trips off the
tongue. "Besides, it'd give you nightmares. But you're the one who
mentioned
hell, and as I was saying"—I stop, with an overflowing
dumpster between
us and the anonymous doorway—"our pet lunatic, who killed all
those
folks at Dillinger Associates and who is now in a committee meeting
upstairs, could conceivably upload bits of SCORPION STARE to the
various camera control centres. Which is why we are going to stop him,
by bringing down the intranet backbone cable in and out of the
Laundry's headquarters. Which would be easy if this was a bog-standard
government office, but a little harder in reality because the Laundry
has guards, and some of those guards are very special, and some of
those very special guards will try to stop us by eating us
alive."

"Eating. Us." Josephine is looking a little
glassy. "Did I tell you that I don't do headhunters? That's
Recruitment's job."

"Look," I say gently, "have you ever seen
Night
of the Living Dead
? It's really not all that different—except that
I've got permission to be here, and you've got a temporary warrant card
too, so we should be all right." A thought strikes me. "You're a cop.
Have you been through firearms training?"

Click-clack.
"Yes," she says drily. "Next question?"

"Great! If you'd just take that away from my
nose—that's better—it won't work on the guards. Sorry, but they're
already, uh, metabolically challenged. However, it
will
work
very nicely on the CCTV cameras. Which—"

"Okay, I get the picture. We go in. We stay out
of the frame unless we want to die." She makes the pistol
vanish inside
her jacket and looks at me askance—for the first time since the car
pound with something other than irritation or dislike. Probably
wondering why I didn't flinch. (Obvious, really: compared with what's
waiting for us inside a little intracranial air
conditioning is a relatively painless way to go, and besides, if she
was seriously pissed at me she could have gotten me alone in a nice
soundproofed cell back in her manor with a pair of size twelve boots
and their occupants.) "We're going to go in there and you're
going to
talk our way past the zombies while I shoot out all the cameras,
right?"

"Right. And then I'm going to try to figure out
how to take down the primary switchgear, the backup substation, the
diesel generator,
and
the batteries for the telephone switch
and the protected computer ring main
all
at the same time so
nobody twigs until it's too late. While fending off anyone who tries to
stop us. Clear?"

"As mud." She stares at me. "I always wanted
to
be on TV, but not quite this way."

"Yeah, well." I glance up the side of the
building, which is windowless as far as the third floor (and then the
windows front onto empty rooms three feet deep, just to give the
appearance of occupation). "I'd rather call in an air strike on
the
power station but there's a hospital two blocks that way and an old
folks' home on the other side … you ready?"

She nods. "Okay." And I take a step round the
wheelie bin and knock on the door.

The door is a featureless blue slab of paint. As
soon as I touch it, it swings open—no creaking here, did you think
this
was a Hammer horror flick?—to reveal a small, dusty room with a dry
powder fire extinguisher bolted to one wall and another door opposite.
"Wait," I say, and take the spray paint can out of my
pocket. "Okay,
come on in. Keep your warrant note handy."

She jumps when the door closes automatically
with a faint hiss, and I remember to swallow—it only looks like a
cheap
fire door from the outside. "Okay, here's the fun
part." I give the
inner door a quick scan with a utility on my palmtop and it comes up
blank, so I put my hand on the grab-bar and pull. This is the moment of
truth; if the shit has truly hit the fan already the entire building
will be locked down tighter than a nuclear bunker, and the thaumaturgic
equivalent of a three-phase six-hundred-volt
bearer will be running through all the barred portals. But I get to
keep on breathing, and the door swings open on a dark corridor leading
past shut storeroom doors to a dingy wooden staircase. And that's all
it is—there's nothing in here to confuse an accidental burglar who
makes it in past the wards in hope of finding some office supplies to
filch. All the really classified stuff is either ten storeys
underground or on the other side of the cellar walls. Twitching in the
darkness.

"I don't see any zombies," Josephine says
edgily, crowding up behind me in the gloom.

"That's because they're—" I freeze and bring up
the dry powder extinguisher. "Have you got a pocket
mirror?" I ask,
trying to sound casual.

"Hold on." I hear a dry click, and then she
passes me something like a toothbrush fucking a contact lens. "Will
this do?"

"Oh wow, I didn't know you were a dentist." It's
on a goddamn telescoping wand almost half a metre long. I lean forward
and gingerly stretch the angled mirror so I can view the stairwell.

"It's for checking the undersides of cars for
bombs—or cut brake pipes. You never know what the little fuckers in
the
school playground will do while you're talking to the
headmistress."

Gulp.
"Well, I guess this is a suitable
alternative use."