The Atrocity Archives (43 page)

I don't see any cameras up there so I retract
the mirror and I'm about to set foot on the stairs when she says, "You
missed one."

"Huh … ?"

She points. It's about waist level, the size of
a doorknob, embedded in the dark wooden wainscoting, and it's pointing
up
the stairs. "Shit, you're right." And there's something
odd about it. I
slide the mirror closer for an oblique look and dry-swallow. "There are
two lenses. Oh, tricky."

I pull out my multitool and begin digging them
out of the wall. It's coax cable, just like the doctor ordered. There's
no obvious evidence of live SCORPION STARE, but my
hands are still clammy and my heart is in my mouth as I realise how
close I came to walking in front of it. How small can they make CCTV
cameras, anyway? I keep seeing smaller and smaller
ones … 

"Better move fast," she comments.

"Why?"

"Because you've just told them you're coming."

"Oh. Okay." We climb the staircase in bursts,
stopping before the next landing to check for more basilisk bugs.
Josephine spots one, and so do I. I tag them with the mostly empty can
of paint, then she blasts their lenses from behind and underneath,
trying not to breathe the fumes in before we move past them. There's an
unnaturally creaky floorboard, too, just for yucks. But we make it to
the ground floor landing alive, and I just have time to realise how
badly we've fucked up when the lights come up and the night watchmen
come out from either side.

"Ah, Bob! Decided to visit the office for once,
have we?"

It's Harriet, looking slightly demented in a
black pinstriped suit and clutching a glass of what looks like fizzy
white wine.

"Where the fuck is everyone else?" I demand,
looking round. At this time of day the place should be heaving with
office bodies. But all I see here is Harriet—and three or four
silently
leaning night watchmen in their grey ministry suits and hangdog
expressions, luminous worms of light glowing in their eyes.

"I do believe we called the monthly fire drill a
few hours ahead of schedule." Harriet smirks. "Then we
locked the
doors. It's quite simple, you know."

Fred from Accounting lurches sideways and peers
at me over her shoulder. He's been dead for months: normally I'd say
this was something of an improvement, but right now he's drooling
slightly as if it's past his teatime.

"Who's
that
?" asks Josephine.

"Who? Oh, one of them's a shambling undead bureaucrat and
the other
one used to work in
accounts before he had a little accident with a summoning." I
bare my
teeth at Harriet. "The game's up."

"I don't think so." She's just standing there,
looking supercilious and slightly triumphant behind her bodyguard of
zombies. "Actually the boot is on the other foot. You're late
and
you're out of a job, Robert. The Counter-Possession Unit is being
liquidated—that old fossil Angleton isn't needed anymore, once we get
the benefits of panopticon surveillance combined with look-to-kill
technology and rolled out on a departmental basis. In fact, you're just
in time to clear your desk." She grins, horribly. "Stupid little boy,
I'm sure they can find a use for you below stairs."

"You've been talking to our friend Mr. McLuhan,
haven't you?" I ask desperately, trying to keep her talking—I
really
don't want the night watchmen to carry me away. "Is he
upstairs?"

"If so, you probably need to know that I intend
to arrest him. Twelve counts of murder and attempted murder, in case
you were wondering." I almost look round, but manage to resist
the
urge: Josephine's voice is brittle but controlled. "Police."

"Wrong jurisdiction, dear," Harriet says
consolingly. "And I do believe our idiot tearaway here has got
you on
the wrong message. That will never do." She snaps her fingers. "Take
the woman, detain the man."

"Stop—" I begin. The zombies step forward,
lurching jerkily, and then all hell breaks loose about twenty
centimetres from my right ear. Zombies make excellent night watchmen
and it takes a lot to knock one down, but they're not bulletproof, and
Josephine unloads her magazine two rounds at a time. I'm dazzled by the
flash and my head feels as if someone is whacking me on the ear with a
shovel—bits of meat and unspeakable ripped stuff go flying, but
precious little blood, and they keep coming.

"When you've
quite
finished," Harriet
hisses, and snaps her fingers at Josephine: the zombies pause for a
moment then close in, as their mistress backs
toward the staircase up to the first floor.

"Quick, down the back corridor there!" I gasp,
pointing to my left.

"The—what?"

"Quick!"

I dash along the corridor, tugging Josephine's
arm until I feel her running with me. I pull my warrant card and yell,
"Open
sesame!"
ahead and doors slam open to either
side—including the
broom closets and ductwork access points. "In here!" I
dive in to one
side and Josephine piles in after me and I yank at the door—
"Close,
damn you, fuck, close sesame!"
and it slams shut with the
hardscrabble of bony fingertips on the outside.

"Got a light?" I ask.

"Nah, I don't smoke. But I've got a torch
somewhere—"

The scrabbling's getting louder. "I don't want
to hurry you or anything, but—" And lo, there is light.

We're standing at the bottom of a shallow shaft
with cable runs vanishing above us into the gloom. Josephine looks
frantic. "They didn't drop! I shot them and they
didn't
drop!"

"Don't sweat it, they're run by remote control."
Maybe now is not the time to explain about six-node summoning points,
the Vohlman exercise, and the minutiae of raising and binding the dead:
they're knocking on the door and they want in. But look, here's
something even
more
interesting. "Hey, I see CAT-5
cabling.
Pass me your torch?"

"This isn't the time to go all geeky on me,
nerd-boy. Or are you looking for roaches?"

"Just fucking do it, I'll explain later, okay?"
Harriet is really getting to me; it's been a long day and I told myself
ages ago that if I ever heard another fucking lecture about timekeeping
from her I'd go postal.

"Bingo." It
is
CAT-5, and there's an
even more interesting cable running off to one side that looks like a
DS-3. I whip out my multitool and begin working on the junction box.
The scrabbling's become insistent by the time
I've uncovered the wires, but what the fuck. Who was it who said,
When
they think you're technical is the time to go crude?
I grab a
handful of network cables and yank, hard. Then I grab another handful.
Then, having disconnected the main trunk line—
mission accomplished
—I
take another moment to think.

"Bob, have you got a plan?"

"I'm thinking."

"Then think faster, they're about to come
through the door—"

Which is when I remember my mobile phone and
decide to make a last-ditch attempt. I speed-dial Bridget's office
extension—and Angleton picks up after two rings. Bastard.

"Ah, Bob!" He sounds positively avuncular. "Where are you? Did you
manage to shut down the
Internet?"

I don't have time to correct him. Besides,
Josephine is reloading her cannon and I think she's going to try a
really
horrible pun if I don't produce a solution PDQ. "Boss, run
McLuhan's
SCORPION STARE tool and upload the firmware to all the motion-tracking
cameras on the ground floor east wing loop
right now.
"

"What? I'm not sure I heard you correctly."

I take a deep breath. "She's subverted the night
watchmen. Everybody else is out of the building. Do it
now
or
I'm switching to a diet of fresh brains."

"If you say so," he agrees, with the manner of
an indulgent uncle talking to a tearaway schoolboy, then hangs up.

There's a splintering crash and a hand rams
through the door right between us and embeds itself in the wall
opposite. "Oh shit," I have time to say as the hand
withdraws. Then a
bolt of lightning goes off about two feet outside the door, roughly
simultaneous with a sizzling crash and a wave of heat. We cower in the
back of the cupboard, terrified of fire until after what seems like an
eternity the sprinklers come on.

"Is it safe yet?" she asks—at least I think
that's what she says, my ears are still ringing.

"One way to find out." I take the broken casing
from the network junction box and chuck it through the hole in the
door. When it doesn't explode I gingerly push the door open. The
ringing is louder; it's my phone. I pull it wearily out of my pocket
and hunch over it to keep it dry, leaning against the wall of the
corridor to stay as far away from the blackened zombie corpses as I
can. "Who's there?"

"Your manager." He sounds merely amused this
time. "What a sorry shower you are! Come on up to Mahogany Row
and dry
off, both of you—the director has a personal bathroom, I think you've
earned it."

"Uh. Harriet? Bridget? McLuhan?"

"Taken care of," he says complacently, and I
shiver convulsively as the water reaches gelid tentacles down my spine
and tickles my balls like a drowned lover.

"Okay. We'll be right up." I glance back at the
smashed-in utility cupboard and Josephine smiles at me like a
frightened feral rat, all sharp teeth and savagery and shining .38
automatic. "We're safe now," I say, as reassuringly as possible. "I
think we won … "

The journey to Angleton's
lair is both up and along—he normally works out of a gloomy
basement on the other side of the hollowed-out block of prime London
real estate that is occupied by the Laundry, but this time he's
ensconced in the director's suite on the abandoned top floor of the
north wing.

The north wing is still dry. Over there, people
are still at work, oblivious to the charred zombies lying on the
scorched, soaked, thaumaturgically saturated wing next door. We catch a
few odd stares—myself, soaked and battered in my outdoors gear, DI
Sullivan in the wreckage of an expensive grey suit, oversized handgun
clenched in a death grip at her side—but wisely or otherwise, nobody
asks me to fix the Internet or demands to know why we're tracking muddy
water through Human Resources.

By the time we reach the thick green carpet and
dusty quietude of the director's suite Josephine's eyes are wide but
she's stopped shaking. "You've got lots of questions,"
I manage to say. "Try to save them for later. I'll tell you everything
I know
and you're
cleared for, once I've had time to phone my
fiancée."

"I've got a husband and a nine-year-old son, did
you think of that before you dragged me into this insane nightmare?
Sorry. I know you didn't
mean
to. It's just that shooting up
zombies and being zapped by basilisks makes me a little upset.
Nerves."

"I know. Just try not to wave them in front of
Angleton, okay?"

"Who
is
Angleton, anyway? Who does he
think he is?"

I pause before the office door. "If I knew that,
I'm not sure I'd be allowed to tell you." I knock three times.

"Enter." Andy opens the door for us. Angleton is
sitting in the director's chair, playing with something in the middle
of the huge expanse of oak desk that looks as if it dates to the 1930s.
(There's a map on the wall behind him, and a quarter of it is pink.)
"Ah, Mr. Howard, Detective Inspector. So good of you to
come."

I peer closer.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
"A
Newton's cradle; how 1970s."

"You could say that." He smiles thinly. The
balls bouncing back and forth between the arms of the executive desktop
aren't chromed, rather they appear to be textured: pale brown on one
side, dark or blonde and furry on the other. And bumpy, disturbingly
bumpy … 

I take a deep breath. "Harriet was waiting for
us. Said we were too late and the Counter-Possession Unit was being
disbanded."

Clack. Clack.

"Yes, she would say that, wouldn't she."

Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.
Finally I
can't stand it anymore. "Well?" I demand.

"A fellow I used to know, his name was Ulyanov,
once said something rather profound, do you
know." Angleton looks like the cat that's swallowed the
canary—and the
feet are sticking out of the side of his mouth; he
wants
me to
know this, whatever it is. "Let your enemies sell you enough
rope to
hang them with."

"Uh, wasn't that Lenin?" I ask.

A flicker of mild irritation crosses his face. "This was before
then," he says quietly.
Clack.
Clack. Clack.
He flicks the balls to set them banging again and I suddenly realise
what they are and feel quite sick. No indeed, Bridget and Harriet—and
Bridget's predecessor, and the mysterious Mr. McLuhan—won't be
troubling me again. (Except in my nightmares about this office, visions
of my own shrunken head winding up in one of the director's executive
toys, skull clattering away eternally in a scream that nobody can hear
anymore … ) "Bridget's been plotting a
boardroom coup
for a long time, Robert. Probably since before you joined the
Laundry—or were conscripted." He spares Josephine a long,
appraising
look. "She suborned Harriet, bribed McLuhan, installed her own
corrupt
geas on Voss. Partners in crime, intending to expose me as an
incompetent and a possible security leak before the Board of Auditors,
I suppose—that's usually how they plan it. I guessed this was going
on,
but I needed firm evidence. You supplied it. Unfortunately, Bridget was
never too stable; when she realised that I knew, she ordered Voss to
remove the witnesses then summoned McLuhan and proceeded with her
palace coup d'état. Equally unfortunately for her, she
failed to
correctly establish who my line manager was before she attempted to go
over my head to have me removed." He taps the sign on the front
of the
desk:
PRIVATE SECRETARY
. Keeper of the
secrets. Whose secrets?