The Rhesus Chart (24 page)

“The cadavers dropped, one by one. And so did Firouz. He’d
threatened
me, so I used his soul as duct tape to paper over the crack that had opened under the gallows.”

She takes a final sip, draining her tumbler. I nod along with her, not trusting myself to speak. This is a part of my work, you see. The organization puts Mo in situations where the only way to survive is to become one of the monsters, and it’s part of my job to hold her together even when she does things that make me want to throw up.

“The Pasdaran soldiers were freaked out and scared, but I took enough from their souls that they didn’t have the wits to realize I was responsible. I can be subtle when I need to. And Ahmad, he, he got it. I explained that this power doesn’t come without a cost, and that if they began hanging people again—anywhere within the jail’s walls—there’d almost certainly be a resumption. ‘But what are we to do with the smugglers and criminals?’ he asked.
Stop killing them,
I suggested. He said he thought it was a good idea and he’d pass it up the line, which means he’ll write a report and they’ll ignore it.

“Then the Pasdaran sergeant decided that waiting around in a haunted execution shed with a spook and a crazy foreign woman and a lieutenant who’d just died of causes unknown was a bad idea, so they shoved us all in the back of a truck and drove me back to the airport and here I am look at me I’m not shaking I’m not mad
I’m just so angry I could kill someone
 . . .”

A LOT CAN HAPPEN IN A MONTH.

A month ago I was back in the office, recovering from the avalanche of virtual paperwork generated by the aftermath of the GOD GAME RAINBOW mess (not to mention the still-unfolding headache of the COBWEB MAZE working group and BLOODY BARON process—our very own happy fun mole hunt), trying to get a handle on my new roles and responsibilities, having Pete’s mentoring program dumped on my desk, and worrying about the doghouse Mo was making me sleep in.

Now
I think things with Mo are patched up—at least insofar as they can be, when she’s still having screaming gallows-chamber nightmares three times a week. Hell,
I’m
having nightmares about what she did, and we’re both resorting to alcohol as a sleeping aid more often than is strictly healthy. I’d go and scream at her supervisory board if I thought it would do any good, but the problem is that
somebody
has to do these jobs, and if not Mo, then who? So I confine myself to writing a stiffly worded memo petitioning them to please fucking ease up on her for a while, because if she gets another assignment like Vakilabad there’s a good chance it will break her. And then I pace her with the whisky bottle each evening.

Meanwhile, Andy is drifting from abandoned store room to temporarily vacant cubicle like a damned soul in exile, clutching his laptop; Pete is getting his teeth into the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY job, prototyping Facebook awareness campaigns and an official Laundry Twitter feed,
*
and I am attending too many committee meetings.

In addition to GOD GAME BLACK, GOD GAME RAINBOW, COBWEB MAZE, and BLOODY BARON, they have dropped another fucking committee process on my head. For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we’ve assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar. It’s a sign that not everybody in the bureaucracy is taking our new photophobic colleagues entirely seriously, because it’s a
really
big security no-no to give a project a moniker that bears any relationship whatsoever to its subject matter. Breaches compartmentalization or something. But for some reason all you have to do is utter the word “vampire” and people around here pull out the pointy plastic choppers and the opera cape like they’re some sort of joke.

It’s not, actually, very funny. It’s like turning up for work one morning at the Met Office and discovering that the earnest people who bring us the shipping forecast are all jovial Young Earth creationists who think Global Warming is a conspiracy by climatologists who are trying to use it to get rich. Or discovering that the Department for Trade and Industry is run by a Reiki practitioner whose special advisor is an astrologer. Or like finding out that the Ministry of Defense is lobbying for the urgent renewal of our strategic nuclear deterrent because it is vitally important to be able to nuke the capital of the Soviet Union at five minutes’ notice.
*
For some reason we seem to have a screamingly huge organizational blind spot—a part of our remit that nobody even believes exists.

But be that as it may, I am jointly assigned as a humble junior manager in External Assets and as private secretary to DSS Angleton. And as a junior manager it is my fate to sit in on the committees my bosses can’t be arsed attending. Consequently I don’t have time to investigate our organizational case of macular degeneration right now because I’m up to my eyeballs in meetings. I don’t even get to goof off from the boardroom antics—I have to summarize for them. It’s like being forced to test a hideous new role-playing game in which you play at being gray-suited office minions trapped in a hellish world of paper-shuffling and boardroom presentations (mediated by frequent dice rolls) without meaning or magic. And because of the fucking DRESDEN RICE committee
other people are
laughing
at me
! Speaking as the former laugh-a-minute guy around here, I’ve got to say that it stings.

So, while I’m busy spending up to six hours in committees every day—yes, the beatings will continue until morale improves—let me give you a whistle-stop tour of the highlights of what’s been going on in the New Annex since last month, in the shape of a clichéd movie montage.

 • • • 

KNOCK KNOCK.

Pete is not expecting anyone to come knocking on his office door. Or rather, the door of the temporarily vacant office to which he has been given a key and in which he has had installed a PC, a chair, a desk, and a bookshelf full of Aramaic concordances. When it comes, Pete is holed up inside, in jeans and a polo shirt, swearing mildly at a web design application as he hunts for typos and grammatical infelicities in the copy he has spent the past weeks laboriously updating from the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY brochure.

Pete looks up. “Come in?” he calls.

The door opens. It’s Andy, escorting a gawky late-teenage stranger on the usual office disorientation tour, wherein they meet loads of strangers and instantly forget their names, merely retaining a vague impression of organizational complexity gone to seed.
Intern,
Pete thinks instantly, then with a flash of mortification:
Am I going native already?
He’s been here for five weeks; it feels like forever and he’s itching to get back to his parish. However the bishop has clearly been nobbled, for he’s sent a circuit priest to pick up the ropes without any complaints or queries; this is England, where the Church is notionally still part of the state, and there’s probably an Office of Occult Coordination tucked away in Canterbury to handle embarrassments like this. At least Sandy is being understanding, and HR are fine with him taking time off work to accompany her to the antenatal clinic.

Pete is desperately aware of his lack of contact with the pastoral concerns of his people, like a nagging awareness that he’s not getting enough vitamins in his diet; but the Laundry is more than capable of pandering to his guilty pleasure, offering glimpses deep into the fascinating patch of applied linguistics that he has tried to build an academic career in. (This Enochian metagrammar thing they’ve been working with demands to be contextualized with the variant proto-Aramaic dialects from which it strikes disturbing echoes.) But instead, they’ve given him this training-wheels web design assignment . . . it’s a learning experience and it’ll probably come in handy when he goes back to the parish newsletter, but it’s not
work
.

“Pete? Hi, I’d like you to meet one of our newest recruits.” Andy smiles warmly as he oozes into the office and somehow migrates into the ratty visitor’s chair without disrupting the pile of yellowing government posters stacked precariously in front of it. “Alex, this is Dr. Peter Wilson,
also
a recent recruit. Pete, this is Alex Schwartz. Um. Alex is also a doctor, although his PhD is in theoretical mathematics, not Aramaic lexicography. Alex, Pete is a vicar by trade.”

Alex, standing beside the door, attempts to fade into the wallpaper. He looks barely old enough to be out of school, much less to have earned a PhD. There is something, Pete realizes, that is not quite right about this picture. The body language is remarkably stand-offish. Maybe he’s an atheist or something? Pete composes his face: “Right now I’m learning to be a web designer,” he says as disarmingly as possible. “What brings you here?”

Andy clears his throat. “Alex is a member of a quantitative analysis research group who inadvertently stubbed their collective toe on something significant, so we’re taking them through the usual in-processing and orientation while we work out what to do with them—basically, health and safety training. Then we and they can decide whether to release them back to what they were doing before, on inactive status, or find a more permanent role for them within the agency if they’re so inclined. Bob told me you were working on MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY, which is a rather low-hazard task, and I was thinking you might want to take on an assistant, for mentoring—”

Gosh, I’ve only been here a few weeks! If they’re asking
me
to mentor someone, they must be really overloaded with new fish!
Pete leans back and, while directing his eyes at Andy, tries to build up a picture of Alex using only his peripheral vision. The wallflower is braced against the side of the filing cabinet. Pallid skin, dark hair, the remains of what must have been a hideously embarrassing adolescent acne attack barely visible on his jawline. If he had better fashion sense he could make a pretty run-of-the-mill goth, but he’s dressed head to toe in M&S office weeds, and hasn’t even discovered the if-everything-you-wear-is-black-it-always-matches trick. He’s seen the type before—they’re all too common on Divinity degree courses: otherworldly, head stuck in a cloud of theory and trainer laces tangled together at ground level. Someone ought to take him in hand, but Pete is brutally aware that with a parish to get back to and the responsibilities of impending fatherhood he just doesn’t have the spare energy for the job. “That’s interesting,” he says to Andy. “What does the mentoring job entail?”

“Well, you’ve been finding your way around the department for the past month but you’re new enough that the frustrating and disorienting stuff is still fresh in your memory, so I was hoping you might be better able to build a rapport with Alex, here. You’re still learning, too, so perhaps if you approach it as a team, with myself and Bob to fall back on . . .” Andy trails off, his pitch delivered, and waits expectantly.

Well, this might not be so bad.
Pete looks directly at Alex. “What do you think, Alex? Are you happy to share a web design and public relations outreach job with a vicar?”

Alex stares at him for precisely three seconds, then says: “I’m a vampire.”

As non sequiturs go Pete has heard worse. In parish work you periodically have to deal with young, slightly alienated gay teens whose overly concerned parents drag them in for a talking-to by the vicar—
there’s something strange about Harry
. Part of Pete’s job (as he sees it) is to talk them down from the ramparts of militant anti-Christianism, explain that no, the entire Church does
not
hate them, and then point them at the nearest LGBT youth counseling service. With luck, in a few years’ time they’ll be happy and stable, and remember you when the last of the reactionary ’phobes have finally flounced out of the General Synod.

You get the really barking cases less often: they’re usually paranoid schizophrenics who are convinced their meds are poisoning them or the radio is giving them orders from the gangster computer god on the dark side of the moon. When Jesus drops round for a chat in the day center, carrying a twelve-hundred-page printout of his new gospel in six-point type with no margins or paragraph breaks, you have to follow a slightly different script: one which involves discreetly checking for concealed carving knives, followed by a phone call to Social Services after he beams back up to the mothership.

Unfortunately there’s no approved C of E standard script to handle
I’m a vampire
. So Pete improvises, and smiles brightly at Alex: “How long have you known you were a vampire?”

The lad relaxes slightly, which is unexpected. “It happened at twenty to seven in the evening, six weeks ago next Tuesday,” he says. His eyes flicker sidelong in a saccade indicative of mild distraction, then he pulls out a gigantic slab of a smartphone and peers at it. “Although I didn’t really confirm it was contagious until the next day at, um, six thirty-three? That’s when I turned Evan. And the blood thing, well, um, ah, that is to say”—his cheeks redden: surely with blood vessels like that he was the victim of any number of cruel embarrassments during his school days!—“we didn’t get to confirm that it actually worked for another couple of days, when management authorized us to take a one-week unscheduled diversionary sprint to provide inputs for the pivot narrative.”

Pete blinks. There are words coming out of Alex’s mouth, and they even sound like English, but—he catches Andy’s eye. Andy nods, almost imperceptibly, but Alex spots it and tenses up again: “I’m not mad!” he says. “I’m not the only one of us, either.”

Andy is clearly playing his cards close to his chest, and this leaves Pete feeling unaccountably annoyed. “I assume if Alex was mad he wouldn’t be here,” Pete points out. “So shall we take it as read that Alex really
is
a vampire?”

Andy muffles a cough with his fist. “The politically correct terminology is still a matter of some debate, but I am told it’s hard to give offense by talking about, ah, Photogolic Hemophagic Anagathic, um, Neurotropic . . . um . . . what does the ‘G’ stand for, Alex?”

“I’m not sure; I think whoever invented it was just fishing for the world’s ugliest medical backronym.” Alex squirms, as if trying to shrug his way out of a straitjacket. “Anyway, it’s PHANG syndrome. Or Persons of PHANG. Photogolic because we
really
don’t get on with sunlight; hemophagic because, er, let’s not go there? Anagathic because some of my older colleagues suddenly don’t look a day over twenty. Neurotropic because it has some other interesting side effects, and the ‘G’ got tacked on the end because you can’t call someone a PHANG Fucker without one, yes, ha ha, very droll, you’d better get it out of your system because you’ll be meeting the rest of us in due course, and Janice
really
doesn’t have a sense of humor about that kind of shit—”