The Rhesus Chart (15 page)

“You said, practitioner. You mean we’re muggles? Something like that?”

Oscar and Pippa have spawned, so they’ve clearly been exposed to the Harry Potter virus along the way. Mhari frowns minutely. “It doesn’t work quite like that.” She thinks for a moment. “There’s not a huge gap between what their practitioners do and what our pigs get up to. They have a saying, magic is a branch of applied mathematics.” Her eyes widen as she drops her fork. “Oh. Shit. Excuse me.” She covers her mouth.

“Oh shit indeed.” Oscar takes a deep breath. “Well, that changes a
lot
of things. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“Because I couldn’t! I didn’t know I could talk about it!” Her barely exaggerated distress is sufficiently obvious that Oscar feels compelled to do the gentlemanly thing, offering her a linen napkin to use as a tissue. She dabs at her eyes, then pushes her plate away. “I don’t feel hungry. I feel
stupid
.”

“Our ability to control ordinary people’s minds doesn’t affect one another,” Oscar notes. “If this organization’s grip on you works the same way—”

“That would explain everything.” She reaches for her tube of
sang de sommelier
and knocks it back in a desperate shot. “
Oh!
This stuff helps me think. Isn’t that stupid? It makes everything clearer.” She stares at Oscar across the ruins of dinner. “I’ve been trying to steer you away from doing anything that I thought would attract their attention, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to come for us sooner or later. I’ve been working on a plan, but being able to tell you about them will make things much easier.” She takes a deep breath. “What we did with the board. Think of it as a dress rehearsal. The stakes next time will be much sharper . . .”

“Then we’ll just have to be ready for them, won’t we? At least we’ll be forewarned and forearmed when your Men in Black pay us a call.” Oscar very deliberately raises the other tube to his lips, uncaps it, and swallows. He shudders very slightly as he puts it down and focusses on her. “But first—”

They don’t even make it to the bedroom this time.

 • • • 

SARA’S BODY RECLINES IN OSCAR’S CHAIR, SLOWLY COOLING,
for nearly three hours after his and Mhari’s departure. That’s how long it takes for her supervisor, annoyed by her failure to report back, to go searching for her. Eva, the supervisor, is so wrapped up in her own timekeeping concerns that she angrily hectors Sara’s body for nearly thirty seconds before she becomes concerned at the corpse’s lack of response and tries to wake her.

The ambulance crew arrive to take her away at one in the morning. The cleaning services duty manager arrives to give the upset supervisor a talking-to half an hour after that, but he reluctantly concedes that there’s more to this business than meets the eye. The cleaning services company has no alternative but to recognize that three employees have died on the job this month, in this particular client’s office, working nights. And while once is happenstance, and twice might be coincidence, three times is sick building syndrome.

A memo is prepared for circulation the next day. And gears begin to turn . . .

MO IS STILL AWAY ON BUSINESS THE NEXT MORNING. I GO IN TO
work early and run into Pete, who has a list of questions three times as long as my left arm (the good one), mostly about what
I’d
do with MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY if it was clogging up my to-do list.

“It’s well past its sell-by date,” he complains over his morning coffee. “I mean, it’s
embarrassing
! They may be valuable cultural artifacts from the 1970s but there’s no AM radio network to plug those sixteen rpm record players into anymore. The posters . . . no. And don’t get me started on the pamphlet! It’s straight out of the Jack Chick school of government communications—if I showed up at synod with a scheme to get bums on pews that relied on that type of paternalist nanny-knows-best approach, I’d, well, I’d be taken aside for tea, biscuits, and a serious talking-to about the history of marketing communications since the
Mad Men
era.”

“Well fine,” I say, interrupting him in full flow. “Can you write a report explaining what’s wrong with it? Main conclusions on the first page, plus supplementary stuff and footnotes?”

“Um, I don’t see why not! Why?”

“Because it’d be a good starting point.” I take a sip of my coffee: it’s still too hot to drink, and I burn the roof of my mouth. “Do that
first
, then we can sit down and brainstorm what a public education campaign
ought
to look like in the era of WikiLeaks and Reddit. Oh, and Arsebook for the unwashed masses.” (Like most other Laundry employees, I shun Facebook: their wheedling attempts to encourage personal disclosure are, shall we say, inimical to the core values of this organization.) “Stuff like, oh, adding ‘how to tell if your neighbors are zombies’ to the NHS Direct website, how to improvise a field-expedient basilisk gun from a pair of webcams, and so on. Disguised as background material for a role-playing game in case it leaks prematurely and we need plausible deniability—”

The phone rings. It’s Dr. Wills, and she’s very unhappy.

Unhappy?

No, she’s livid.

“Mr. Howard!” she snaps. “I don’t know what you’re bloody playing with over there but I’ve just spent the past twelve hours digging through medical records and if this
is
your fault it’s a disaster, and if it
isn’t
your fault we’ve got a major-incident grade emergency on our hands—”

“Wait,” I choke out, “we’re talking about the, the report I brought round yesterday?”

“What
else
would we be talking about?”

My jaw flaps uselessly. See, it’s the sudden cognitive whiplash that does it. One moment you’re cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you’re in a screaming death-spiral with flames pouring from the hole where the starboard engine was meant to be before some toe-cheese puked a missile up its exhaust. It takes a little time to switch mode from business-as-usual to six-alarms-emergency if you’re not primed to expect it, and so far this morning I’ve been trying to think my way into Pete’s problem space, which is really just a training-wheels situation. Pete, for his part, is looking at me as if my head’s begun spinning round spouting ectoplasm and he’s wondering if an exorcism is called for. I wave a hand at him, then try to get a grip on myself. Dr. Wills is still talking when I finally get my voice back. “What exactly have you turned up?” I ask.

“Bodies. Are you people responsible for them?”

“No, I just went looking on a hunch.” I take a deep breath. “How many of that cluster were false positives?”

“None of them. I think you’d better come round here right now, Mr. Howard. We’re going to need to know everything you know if we’re going to contain this outbreak.”

I make a snap decision. “I’ll be round within two hours. With backup. Please don’t go public until we’ve spoken, for any reason at all.”

Then I hang up, and quickly dial another number, the duty officer’s desk line.

“Bob Howard speaking. As a result of information I have just received, I am declaring Code Blue, Code Blue, Code Blue. This is not a drill.” I have
never
said those words before, in the decade-plus I’ve worked for the Laundry. “I need the emergency first response team to meet me in Briefing Room 201 in fifteen minutes. I’m heading up there right now, and I will be going off-site in an hour. Bye.” I hang up.

“What does Code Blue mean?” Pete asks curiously.

“That the shit has just hit the fan.” I twitch, then drain my coffee mug. “Nothing you can help with; sorry, you’re on your own—I’m out of here.”

And with that, I head for the stairs up to Mahogany Row.

 • • • 

NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THIS:

The Laundry is a government agency. It runs on rules: like all bureaucracies, it is designed to get the job done, regardless of the abilities of the individual human cogs in the machine.

However, once you get above a certain level, the practice of magic is somewhat idiosyncratic. Some people have a natural aptitude for it, perhaps for the same reason that abilities are not evenly distributed among computer programmers. Some folks can’t handle abstract reasoning and formal logic, others thrive on it.

And so we have the everyday working stiffs, folks who in another age would have spent their days grinding out COBOL reports in a dinosaur pen somewhere. And we have the wizards, the people who write the COBOL compilers. In our case, they’re literally wizards. We call them Mahogany Row—a little piece of misdirection, as most of the folks in the bureaucracy think that Mahogany Row is about management. The actual corridor with the plush offices and the decent carpet and the collection of paintings from the National Art Collection is usually deserted; the joke in the lower ranks is that our management have all sublimed or transsubstantiated or something. The truth is that they’re
not
management—but they’re scattered throughout the organization, given special privileges, and they can call on the full force of the agency to back them up as and when it becomes necessary. Once upon a time they were known as the Invisible College, presided over by John Dee at the behest of Sir Francis Walsingham, operating on the House of Lords black budget; today they’re the powerful sorcerers at the heart of the organization.

For my part, I’m apprenticed to (and, it would seem, entangled with) a very nasty, very powerful entity who just happens to have thrown in his lot with the Laundry; I’m learning the principles of optimizing compiler design, so to speak. I’m at a high enough level to stick my head above the parapet and see what the non-bureaucracy portions of the organization get up to, while not actually being one of those movers and shakers (yet). So when I open the door to Briefing Room 201 I am extremely relieved to see Angleton sitting at one end of the table and staring at me as if he expects me to confess how I drunkenly broke into his office and threw up in his paper recycling bin last night.

(Because when you really need backup, even an Angleton who’s pissed at you for disturbing his quiet Tuesday morning is better than no Angleton at all.)

“Hi, boss. Better cancel your lunch plans.”

“This had better be serious, Mr. Howard.” Angleton is gaunt and pale, his eyes slightly sunken: he has all the intensity and warmth of a public school mathematics teacher preparing to ream out a particularly delinquent schoolboy. I must confess to playing up to his expectations from time to time: I think he likes having a target who won’t flee screaming every time he says “boo.” But this is no time for games.

“I believe it is,” I say soberly.

I take a seat just as the door opens again and Lockhart enters. He’s another late-middle-aged ex-military alpha type. Most people in the organization think EA are in the business of tracking paper clips we’ve loaned to other government departments. This misunderstanding is highly convenient for EA. What they
actually
do is provide backup to external assets—high-level operatives working unaccountably and without official sanction, all very
Mission: Impossible
.

“What’s this about, Mr. Howard?” he demands.

I glance at my watch.
Four minutes: not bad.
“I’m waiting for Andy, Jez, and Mona to show up. They’re on rotation this week, right?”

“They’ll be along, boy.” Angleton leans forward. “What have you been doing?”

The door opens; it’s Andy. “It’s my ten-percenter project,” I begin. “I’m investigating possible uses we can make of access to the NHS Spine’s Secondary Usage Service—a data warehouse for clinical medical information, statistics on medical treatment, outcomes, and so forth. The original proposal from the suggestions box was to use it for advance warning of outbreaks of, well, anything relevant. Last week I began a run, and as a test case I went looking for cases of Krantzberg syndrome, expecting to find nothing at all because, let’s face it, your average K syndrome case is an occultist who crawls into a hole and dies rather than clogging up the emergency room.”

Andy is clearly one step ahead of my briefing because his muffled “Oh
shit
” is loud enough to draw a disapproving look from Lockhart, who is Old School about etiquette and bad language and so forth.

Angleton looks at me grimly. “I assume you called us here to tell us your assumption was mistaken?”

“Twelve cases in the last month,” I say flatly. “Diagnosed at post-mortem, which is wrong for K syndrome. It normally presents like CJD, months before death, gives us plenty of time to treat it. It’s up from a baseline of effectively two or three cases a year. I asked Dr. Wills at UCLH—she’s one of ours—to investigate in case I’d made a mistake and she just got back in touch to confirm that it’s for real. They all worked as office cleaners for an agency in the East End. I’m about to go round to the National Prion Unit and see what Dr. Wills has got, and will take it from there, but I declared Code Blue right now because”—I shrug—“do I need to draw you a diagram?”

“Oh
dear
,” says Jez. She slipped in while I was talking, right behind Andy. She’s management, subtype: sarcastic old IT hand, female, came out of Cambridge and has forgotten more about functional programming than I ever knew. I spot Mona as well. “Twelve cases, one month. How serious can it be?”

“Up from zero the month before that,” I remind her. “The worst case, if I understood Dr. Wills properly, is we’re watching the early stages of an epidemic’s exponential take-off. There was another case this morning. Even if it’s not going exponential, it’s going to be very hard to sweep under the rug—it’s a major spike in the national CJD mortality statistics. It all depends what we’re looking at, but by the end of next month we could be into
Twelve Monkeys
territory. Or
28 Days Later
. Or Captain Trips.”

Angleton looks at me blankly but Lockhart is suitably disturbed and Jez and Andy turn gray. Yay for pop-culture references. “Well bloody
get moving then
,” grates Lockhart, his hairy caterpillar of a mustache bunching defensively along his upper lip.

“What resources do you need?” asks Angleton.

“Right now?” I look along the table. “Andy, do you have a couple of hours to come off-site with me?” I look back at Angleton. “I’m on first response. If you could prime OCCULUS, just in case I need backup? Andy can handle direct liaison with this committee and be my backup during initial enquiries. My first objective is to quantify the outbreak, identify its scope and geographical distribution, find out where the victims worked as opposed to where their head office is based, and identify what level of response is appropriate. Then I intend to shake the data and see if anything falls out—a pump handle for the cholera epidemic. Any comments?”

Angleton nods. “It’s your show: get on the road, boy. Call if you need assets in the field, otherwise we should aim to reconvene here in four hours.”

Jez looks at me. “Do you have any leads on the source? If this
is
K syndrome?”

“If it isn’t, it’s the world’s fastest outbreak of Mad Cow Disease. Or something worse.” I shove my hands in my pockets to keep from waving them around; it doesn’t do to look agitated when you’re trying to organize a measured response. “How we’re going to keep the lid on this, I have no idea.”

Medical scandals are a specialty of the British press, and with the government hell-bent on privatizing the NHS via the back door, they’re sniffing around for anything that might make headline material. A dozen exotic deaths in one cleaning company will be all over the front pages if it gets out.

“I’ll notify Public Affairs,” says Jez. “Anything else?”

There is some more back-and-forth over things people present feel they can usefully take off my shoulders. Not because we’ve got the collegiate warm fuzzies for each other, but because they realize that the more balls I’m juggling the greater the chance that I’ll drop one, or get myself killed, and then they’ll have an even bigger mess to clean up. At least we’re all grown-ups here: nobody is questioning the severity of the situation, or the need for calling a Code Blue emergency.