The Rhesus Chart (30 page)

“Oh dear”—Pete’s hand moves instinctively to his throat—“God.”

“They still eat and drink normal food,” I add. “I’ve seen them in the staff canteen, complaining about the mac and cheese just like everyone else. So it seems to be more like the transitive-hemophagic-curse model of vampirism than the blood-drinking-zombie story. The trouble is, we don’t know yet if everyone they feed on develops V syndrome. And we don’t know whether they can live without human blood, or use some acceptable substitute, or whatever. Or how often they need to feed. If it turns out to be optional, well, that’d be like the question of celibacy in the priesthood, wouldn’t it?” Pete nods thoughtfully. Sandy, his wife, is due to pop in about two months’ time. “But if they have to feed or die, and the victims
also
die, what the hell are we going to do with them?”

“That’s a sharp dilemma.” Pete pauses. “Maybe find donors who are terminally ill . . .” He shakes his head, looking pained.

“
Now
do you see why putting a PHANG in charge of OPERA CAPE is a bad idea?” I ask. “Someone—I
really
hope it’s not me—is going to have to make some hard decisions sooner or later. Value judgments that factor in who does the dying and who does the living, and whether the moral calculus makes maintaining vampires worthwhile to the organization.

“But there’s something worse.” I self-censor the obvious next sentence: that Angleton as good as told me that Mhari got shoved onto the committee to expose her. Neither Andy nor Pete need to know that. I continue: “It occurs to me that there is something very smelly about the number of people who have been telling me that vampires don’t exist—here, in an agency
devoted
to the occult.”

Andy’s eyes widen. “You’re wondering if we’ve been infiltrated.” I can tell he’s rattled: he instinctively reaches for his e-cigarette.

“Yes.” I try to smile reassuringly, but the twitching tic in my cheek probably undermines the effect. “I might be jumping at shadows”—I really don’t want to tell him what Angleton told me, because that kind of knowledge is dangerous—“but it’s good to be sure, isn’t it? So I’m officially declaring this the first meeting of the, um . . . Let’s find an unassigned codeword.”
Clickety-click.
“Ah, GREEN LIME is free, so we’ll use that. Yes, this is the GREEN LIME committee. Circulation: restricted, no reporting. Budget: bill to Bob Howard, discretionary funding authorization pending approval. Initial membership: Bob Howard, Andy Newstrom, Peter Wilson, and, uh, Spooky the Office Cat. Remit: to examine archival resources for evidence supporting the hypothesis that one or more PHANGs have been operating within the Laundry and working to conceal signs of their own existence, and if so, to identify the blood-sucking mole. Hopefully we’ll draw a blank, but if not, it’ll give me some ammunition when I escalate it to the next level.

“You’re drafted. So how about we work up a plan of action, then hit the archives?”

“HI, HONEY, I’M HOME!”

I needn’t have bothered calling: the house is dark and cold, the heating turned down. I pick up the two crates and trudge inside. One of them complains vocally, the other reeks silently.
That
one can live under the stairs. The loud one I carry into the kitchen, where it moans like a particularly deranged ghost as I hang my coat and gloves up in the hall. Then I turn the lights on, fiddle with the thermostat, and let Spooky out of her carrier.

“Waaow?”

I remember to close the kitchen door just before the little fuzzball wanders out into the hall, then set my backpack down and start unloading supplies: food bowl, water bowl, kibble. There’s a thudding sound behind me: I whip round in a hurry and am confronted by a mad, black-eyed stare from atop the kitchen table. “Hey, cat, what are you doing there? Get down—”

Spooky levitates as if a poltergeist has just grabbed her. She comes down on top of the kitchen unit, a good two meters away, then leaps again, for the precarious gap between the top of the storage unit and the ceiling.

“Oh for fuck’s sake—” I pause.
Why the hell am I talking to a cat?
I wonder, resolving to ignore her. She’ll come down when she’s hungry or needs the litter tray or something. It’s been a long day and I do not find it relaxing to chase an antigravity-enabled predator with a butterfly net. So I finish unpacking provisions instead, listen to the radiators gurgling away as our ancient central heating system struggles to emit a trickle of hot water, then haul out my battered netbook to spend some quality time anonymously stalking my relatives on Facebook.

After about half an hour I realize there’s an unaccustomed warmth on my lap. And it’s
buzzing
. This perplexes me for a few seconds, until I realize what it is. Dammit, I’ve caught lap fungus! I carefully reach down with a fingertip, which Spooky sniffs, then attempts to pick her nose on. Then, while I’m trying to work out how to make a dash for the kitchen sink without being lacerated, I hear the front door opening.

“Hi, honey, I’m home?”

It’s Mo, of course. The joke may be threadbare but it’s not
entirely
worn out yet. But I instinctively move to stand up, at which point Spooky startles and emulates a rapidly deflating party balloon in terms of high-speed movement and random three-dimensional handbrake turns. She ends up crouched on top of the smoke extractor over the cooker, glowering at me as if I’m to blame.

“In here,” I call, standing and walking over to switch the kettle on. The kitchen door opens.

“What a day—” Mo freezes, violin case in hand. “What’s
that
?” she demands, bristling.

Oh dear.
“Mo, meet Spooky. She’s the stray who’s been hanging out around the dumpsters at work; she followed me indoors today, and I was going to take her to the Cat and Dog Home but—”

“Oh for—” Mo plants her violin case on the kitchen table, removes her glasses, and rubs her eyes tiredly. (No eye shadow, I note, just old-fashioned exhaustion.) “It can’t stay here, it’s probably got fleas.”

“Not anymore.” Spooky has a shiny new flea collar. “Anyway, she doesn’t have to stay, but I couldn’t leave her in the New Annex overnight—the cleaners would eat her.”

“You didn’t think to put her back outside?”

“The forecast said frost tonight.” The kettle boils right then, so I busy my hands with the making of a pot of tea, leaving my brain free to chew over whether I’m simply making excuses or, or, or.

“Well,
you’re
on litter tray duty. Not my problem. And if it craps in my shoes it can look forward to a promising future as a violin string.”

Spooky stares at Mo with enormous black eyes, pupils fully dilated. She looks as if she understands
exactly
what Mo is saying, and likes none of it. “Well okay,” I say. “But if you’re so worried, how about we just spread a tarp or one of those gigantic plastic IKEA shopping bags over your precious footwear?”

“Feh. It’s
my
house, the lodgers are the ones who should go out of their way not to make waves.” She sits down and I suppress a sigh of relief.

“Bad day?” I ask.

“
Terrible.
First, I had two hours of instrument practice cancelled because of a problem with the anechoic damping in Practice Room Two—there was too much leakage. Turns out a dripping pipe in the ceiling had soaked some of the panels. Then I had another shitty committee meeting I shouldn’t really talk about, all to do with the fallout from Vakilabad. Our people in the FO are going to deliver a strongly worded complaint, threaten to withhold cooperation if they don’t promise to tell us the entire truth when they ask for assistance in future. There might even be some finger-wagging.” (Which seems only reasonable to me.) “Seems that what’s gotten up certain people’s collective nose isn’t what the Pasdaran wanted me to do, but the way they went about it. I’m afraid I had a little snit.”

Her eyes
are
puffy, I realize. And she usually spends a few minutes on cosmetic basics before interdepartmental sessions, suggesting— “Oh, Mo.”

She waves it off. “I didn’t break down or get excessively emotional—in the meeting. I
did
raise my voice a little. Had to remind them I’m not a fucking human waste disposal machine. Crashed and burned afterwards.”

I pivot silently from teapot to drinks cupboard, wherein I locate the remains of the bottle of Glenmorangie from the other night. There are still a couple of fingers left in it so I pour them all into a tumbler and shove it in front of her. “Sun’s over the yardarm. Drink.”

“If I must.” She looks morose. I turn back to the pot, add loose-leaf tea and hot water, and set it aside to brew. “There is a distinct lack of contact with the hard edges of reality in some parts of the organization these days.”

“Alternatively, you spend too much time poking around corners of the envelope that sensible people stay away from,” I propose.

“
Somebody’s
got to do it.” She stares at me.

“I had an interesting interview with Angleton today,” I say, “between meetings. Well, after one meeting. Then I sort of called another.” I look guilty. “I created a new committee.”

“Oh. Really?”

“I think someone inside the organization is trying to gaslight us.”

“Well,
that’d
be a first.” She knocks back a startlingly large gulp of water-of-life then puts the tumbler down and fans herself. “Nobody, in the history of the Laundry, has
ever
tried to pull the wool over anyone else’s eyes—”

“Planet Earth calling?”

“Yes?” She pays attention but she looks worried. My heart goes out to her but I’m not sure how to break through the icy sheen of cynicism she’s wrapping around herself.

“‘There’s no such thing as vampires,’” I finger-quote at her. “I keep
hearing
that. Even from people who know better.”

“But that’s—” She peers at me. “Bob?”

I peer back at her, confused. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

I shake my head. I’m feeling distinctly fuzzed. “I
found
them. Genuine no-shit vampires.” I motor on, anticipating her resistance and not wanting this to turn into another argument: “As in, they’re super-strong, can project at least a level three glamour, are predisposed for the practice of ritual magic, and they need factor-one-million sunblock to go outside in daylight. Oh, they also drink blood. Unfortunately I didn’t find them fast enough; Mhari got there first and reactivated herself and now HR are running in circles trying to draw up a policy for handling their Special Needs.”

“What? Mary who, hang on, wasn’t she your . . .”

“Yes,
her
. Mhari Murphy. Back from the land of the merchant bankers and even crazier and more ambitious, in a blonde-executive-with-sharp-shoulder-pads-and-sharper-fangs kind of way.”

Mo stares at me for a moment, clearly wondering if I’ve taken leave of my senses. Then she takes another sip of whisky and sits back, the gears visibly beginning to mesh. “You’ve verified this, I take it.”

“Oh
hell
yes.” I count off points on my fingers. “Epidemiological factors—we’ve got a whole new thaumodegenerative neuropathy to deal with, tentatively called V syndrome. Andy can vouch for my research on the data mining side. That’s all logged confidential OPERA CAPE. Then we’ve got the HR briefing and the DRESDEN RICE committee, currently sitting. The clusterfuck when I confronted them, well, you can find it filed under BLUE DANDELION. And I just set up another one, GREEN LIME, although we haven’t got very far yet.
That
one is investigating the possibility that for some time now we’ve been infested with fang fuckers telling everyone to shut up and look the other way because
there’s no such thing as vampires
.”

There’s an odd double-thud. I look round: Spooky has teleported from the extractor hood to the worktop and is now sniffing the electric kettle suspiciously.

“Vampires? You’re sure? That can’t be right . . .”

“They’re not fucking Dracula but they’re close enough for government work. It’s fallout from an algorithm research group supporting the quantitative trading desks at one of our larger banks. Turns out a rather rare combination of a multidimensional visualization system and a particular area of group theory makes mild-mannered mathematicians grow fangs. Anyway, the first of them only turned about five or six weeks ago. He turned his colleagues, and they went all agile on it, exploring the parameters, which triggered the V syndrome spike in Tower Hamlets which led me to them.”

“Where does Mhari come into all this?” Mo asks, still sounding confused. “I thought she got shown the door, years ago?”

“Too right. She was on the permanent sabbatical list. Trouble is, they showed her the door by way of an entrance interview with an investment bank. She’s been management track ever since and ended up as second in command on this team. So they turned
her
. And
she
knew about
us
, so she phoned it in and, as an ex-HR body, she knew exactly how to induct her little bat-buddies into the Laundry. Did it in the nick of time, too, just before I turned up with an OCCULUS truck and half of Special Branch in tow.”

“Oh good god.” Mo doesn’t believe in any gods other than the ones I believe in, but the expostulation comes instinctively.

“I know it’s not a bunch of bloody-handed lunatics from the Middle East, love, but I have had my hands
ever so slightly full
this past week . . .”

“Vampires.” She takes another sip of whisky. Her shoulders are shaking with suppressed laughter or anger or something. “Blood-sucking fiends.” More shaking. I can’t tell whether it’s mirth or hysteria, which worries me. “Poor Bob!”

“Maaaaow?”

I ignore the cat. “It’s not funny,” I say stiffly. “They drink blood. Not much, but the donors die of something like Krantzberg syndrome.”

“A-HAHAhaha—”
It’s like a sneeze, and it passes just as fast. “What?”

“I said, their victims
die
. I’m guessing there’s a sympathetic connection. Whatever gives them their vampiric superpowers is like the K syndrome parasite, but instead of chewing down on their own gray matter, it uses them as a vector—to take blood meals that allow them to sample many more victims.”

“Oh. Oh shit.” She drains the glass. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What
can
I do?” The tea’s brewed; I pour myself a mug. “Right now we don’t even know if they have to drink blood to survive, or if it’s optional. Right now we’re still gathering data.
Right now
I suspect we’ve had a fang fucker in the organization all along, telling us they don’t exist. The intensity of collective denial has been, shall we say, anomalous.” Spooky, tired of being ignored, starts gently bumping her head against my ankle. “But if you could keep your eyes open, I’d be very grateful. Coordinate with Gerry and Angleton and Andy. I’ve got a bad feeling about this . . .”

 • • • 

IT IS TRADITIONAL, AT THIS JUNCTURE IN THE NARRATIVE, TO
insert yet another Hollywood-style montage of diligent bureaucrats sleeplessly combing the archives in search of clues to the identity of the enemy mole within their organization. (Optional: one of them is stabbed in the jugular by said mole while working late. They use their last five minutes not to call for an ambulance, but to compose an amusing cryptogram naming their assailant, and to finger-paint it on the underside of their desk using their own blood as ink. Where it is found the next morning by Facilities and promptly cleaned up before anyone with a clue gets to see it.)

Well
fuck that shit
.

What actually happens is called Division of Labor, with a nod and a wink to security protocols. Andy and I send Pete away to draw up a questionnaire about vampires and why people think they don’t exist, emphasis on the “why.” We want to find out if vampire denialism is a statistical anomaly, so we plan to use his church as a control cohort. If anyone asks he can soft-soap it as an enquiry into the level of belief in supernatural phenomena among his parishioners. (We remind him to keep this away from Alex for the time being.)