The Rhesus Chart (32 page)

“Really?”

“I can vouch for him.” I glance at Pete, minutely, and Andy nods, getting the picture. “Unless Angleton had some other reason to squelch the old vampire monitoring program, it’s not him. And as he’s on . . .” Andy nods again. Pete has no need to know about BLUE DANDELION. So I change the subject away from sensitive topics. “Pete, what have you discovered so far?”

“Oh, that’s easy!” He looks up. “Would you believe that, of forty-six parishioners informally polled, thirty-six of them believe in the existence of evil incarnate, in the person of the Devil?” He sighs. “Well, their average age was somewhere north of sixty, and they’re self-selected for being frequent attendees at religious services, so there was bound to be an element of literal-mindedness to them. But, taking the Devil as a baseline, the really interesting thing is that forty of them believe in vampires. Over 85 percent! Vampires are out-polling Satan in the bogeyman charts this decade.”

He takes a mouthful of fizz. “Mind you, I added a couple of control questions. I said they were a self-selected sample? 52 percent of them think gays are going to hell, and 39 percent think the Earth was created late one Saturday night in October of 4004 BC.” He looks pained. “I can see I have some sermons to write on the subject of metaphor and creation myths. And tolerance.”

“What about the office?” I ask.

“Well, um, I had a problem there. I emailed the same questionnaire to the entire department and Jack from the Security Office came round to have a little chat about
asking questions
—”

“Oh shit,” Andy and I say, nearly simultaneously.

“No, no, it was quite all right!” Pete looks startled at our reaction. “I explained that I was sending out the poll because you’d asked me to.” I tense. “Then I asked if he really believed in vampires or Satan? So we had a good chuckle and he went away. Answer was ‘no’ and ‘no,’ by the way.”

The cold sweat that began to spring up the instant Pete mentioned Jack from Security is drying. I share a knowing look with Andy. Mentally I’m kicking myself. Tasking Pete with asking questions of his church parishioners? That’s totally fine. Pete asking questions of random passers-by in a secret government security organization is another matter entirely. I should have seen this coming—by nature he’s an organizer, so of course he’d mailbomb the entire department, and of course Security would prick up their ears the instant someone not on their radar began asking questions. Even innocent-sounding ones. Demarcation and Chinese Walls and OPSEC and need-to-know rule our procedures. Those of us who are on the ladder and have worked together for over a decade sometimes cut corners to get things done, but a new inductee is another matter entirely.

Luckily, everyone in the Laundry knows that Satan doesn’t exist. (We have worse nightmares to keep us awake in the dark.)

“Pete,” Andy says, calmly enough, “I don’t think you should get into the habit of asking questions on unclassified mailing lists. In fact, before you do that again, just make a point of checking if it’s okay with me or Bob, right? We wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”

“Oh. Um. I see.” Pete is subdued, perhaps a little surprised at how scared we both looked for a moment. Not realizing that we’re not scared for
us
, we’re scared for
him
.

“Did you get any results?” I ask, leaning forward.

“Um, yes!” Pete brightens. “Mostly from junior staff and new inductees—I included a time-of-service question and the median was fifteen months. It turns out that of the eighteen responses I got,
nobody at all
believes in Satan and only two believe in vampires. Those two were recent inductees, by the way, time of service less than twelve months. Age is much more representative than the church survey, averaging thirty-two, outliers as young as twenty-one and as old as, well, one joker wrote in that they were two hundred and thirty-one and what was my blood group, please?”

Pete stops and stares at me. Then at Andy. “That was a joke, right?” he asks uncertainly. “Wasn’t it?”

“Do you still have the responses?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level and even and unfrightening.

“Sure: they’re in a mail archive I created for them . . .”

“What do you think?” I ask Andy.

“I think”—Andy looks as worried as I feel—“it’s probably a joke.
Probably.
”

“Well, then,” I say, pushing my mostly undrunk pint glass away: “Let’s go and find out, shall we?” I stand up.

“What, right now?” asks Pete.

“When better?”

 • • • 

BUT WHEN WE GET BACK TO PETE’S OFFICE HE CAN’T FIND HIS
mailbox full of survey responses.

I spend a fruitless and frustrating hour digging around with some forensics tools and groveling over logfiles. And finally I work out what happened. Pete did indeed save all his survey responses to a mail archive. But he stashed it on the local drive of the PC he was working on. Which is, of course, connected to our NAS. And for some reason when he logged out the VM image he was working on didn’t get uploaded back to the storage array. So when we came storming back into the office and Pete logged himself in for me, he downloaded a stale copy of the VM he’d been working with, which scribbled all over the local copy with the mail archive. And because we are the Laundry and we are hip to the whole INFOSEC thing, these days our desktop PCs store everything local in a rather expensive PCIe RAM disk card (not even Flash—Flash memory retains data when you pull the plug) with whole disk encryption. And it’s soldered to the PC’s chassis,
precisely
because we don’t want random interlopers to be able to trivially retrieve erased files.

Somewhere in the guts of the departmental mail server there’s a logfile recording the origin and destination of every email message that was delivered to Pete’s desktop client. (Or anybody else’s, for that matter.) But somehow I don’t expect to find Pete’s joker listed in it.

In the process of confirming that belief in vampires is bizarrely, implausibly low within the organization, and that an active surveillance program was discontinued more than forty years ago, we’ve blundered into a tripwire.

And now they know we know.

DESPITE MY DEEP FOREBODING OVER THE ENTIRE FANG FUCKER
fiasco, life goes on.

Work
: I attend committee meetings, write reports, and continue to grind on the bid acceptance process for the networking infrastructure in Dansey House (which is running eight months behind schedule already, and losing ground by approximately forty days per elapsed month of calendar time). I also get to go off-site a couple of times because I am supposed to be taking a self-defense course. Not that I’ve ever been much into unarmed martial arts—my general response to people trying to kill me is to scream and run away as fast as I can: I
don’t like pain
—but some REMF in HR has expressed concern about my ability to look after myself without a basilisk gun and a Hand of Glory. And after my run-in with Alex and Janice, I have to admit that they have a point. So it’s off to the dojo I go-go, dammit. (Where I am signed off as somewhere between “cannon fodder” and “zombie bait,” but that’s another story.)

Play
: at the weekend, Mo and I visit my parents again. They’ve stopped taking every available opportunity to ask when they can expect to hear the patter of tiny feet, which is a minor blessing, but our inability to talk about work and their inability to talk about work (because Dad’s recently retired and his idea of a hobby is watching
EastEnders
) are leading to increasingly uncomfortable gaps in the conversation. Mum
insists
on baking cakes, and Dad discovered one of the secrets of a happy marriage early on (never criticize your spouse’s culinary skills) and applies it as a religious observance. So, let’s just say Mum’s cakes are sub-optimal and leave it at that, shall we?

Despite the lack of children there is a new and exciting presence in our life. When we get home, we discover that Spooky has expressed her displeasure at being left all alone in the dark in typical feline fashion, right in the middle of the front hall. Mo waits outside in the cold while I deal with it, and it takes considerable effort to persuade her that she doesn’t actually want a new fiddle
right now
. In other news from the Fur Kids Department, the expensive new cat-tree goes unused, the living room sofa receives the Spooky imprimatur of best scratching post
ever
, and every open cardboard box in the house receives a mysterious lining of shed hairs. Spooky is a graduate of the “if I fits, I sits” school of feline furnishings. (If Mo ever gets serious about getting rid of the cat, all she needs to do is to leave an open FedEx shipping box on the kitchen table.)

Spooky has also developed a bad habit of waking up in the middle of the night and screaming that she’s being attacked by an axe murderer (“Help! I’m all alone in the dark! Where are you?”), then haughtily ignoring me when I go downstairs to see what all the fuss is about.

And don’t get me started on vet bills. Let’s just say that civil service salaries and pet ownership are two lifestyle flavors that really do
not
go well together.

The following Monday I get up at my accustomed time to find Mo is in the kitchen, suited and booted and double-checking her go-bag. “Jesus, what is it
now
?” I ask. “I thought we were supposed to be looking for a spa break?”

“Got an email this morning,” she tells me. “Actually Gerry Lockhart forwarded it on Friday evening but we’d already left the office and Facilities were taking the mail server down for maintenance.” I startle guiltily: that was probably me, going through the server logs with fire and the sword in search of Pete’s joker. “Calm
down
, Bob, it’s not OpExec this time. Turns out the negotiation team for BLUE HADES—it’s the once-a-decade Benthic Treaty renewal fish-fest—are down one sorcerer: Julie Warren’s got pneumonia, so Gerry asked me if I could go along to bulk up the front-facing team. You know how They get if They think we aren’t taking Them seriously.”

They
are the Deep Ones, the ancient alien water-world types who own about 70 percent of the planet’s usable surface area (the bits that are below the crush depth of our nuclear-powered submarines). We have an agreement with them: we agree not to piss them off (by, for example, building the Underwater City of Tomorrow! or otherwise intruding on their territory without prior arrangement) and they agree not to exterminate us. The bilateral agreements need to be renewed regularly by just about every nation with a coastline and a submarine, and BLUE HADES tend to get stroppy if they think we’re taking the piss or getting blasé about them. So every decade a bunch of our more powerful occult offensive operatives get to hole up on a disused North Sea accommodation rig and play bodyguard to the folks from the Foreign Office (Non-human Affairs Department).

“How long are you going to be gone this time?” I ask, relaxing slightly.

“I have to be on a chopper out of RAF Lossiemouth at about six o’clock tomorrow morning, which means catching the morning flight to Aberdeen, then an onward flight this afternoon. Then I’ll be with the negotiating team for, hopefully, a day or two, and back home again. Don’t worry, love, I just have to hang around and look professionally formidable.”

“But if things go wrong—”

“I said
don’t worry
, dear.
Nothing
is going to go wrong.” She smiles at me, a trifle sadly.

“But—” I shut up.

What she
actually
means is that everything will be all right unless someone on our team fucks up and offends BLUE HADES so badly that no conceivable apology is acceptable. In which case, the first we’ll know about it is when the Storegga Shelf and Cumbre Vieja simultaneously collapse. You won’t be reading about it in the newspapers because the combined hundred-meter super-tsunamis will wash the British Isles clean (killing everybody who lives within a hundred kilometers of the coast on both sides of the North Atlantic, just for an encore). The devastation will make a strategic nuclear war look like a lovers’ quarrel.

“Well, good luck, or break a leg, or whatever.” I stand up and she walks towards me and we hug. “And say ‘hi’ to you-know-who if you see her.”

“Unlikely.” She hugs me again, then lets go. “Be good while I’m gone, okay? And stroke the cat for me.”

Then she leaves.

 • • • 

“DUDES, THIS IS
NOT
WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR! WHERE’S MY
tuxedo? Where is my license to kill? Where are the hot Bond Babes? This
sucks
!”

Evan juggles his furry dice while he complains before an audience of one: Alex. Evan used to be able to keep three or four in the air for a couple of minutes before he dropped them. Now he’s casually keeping eight at a time airborne without even tracking them with his eyes. There’s a fat ring-bound training manual on the chipped utilitarian desk, and every ten seconds or so his left hand zips sideways to flip a page as he speed-reads, swinging back in time to catch a falling die.

Alex hunches in on himself, hugging his stomach. “She warned us,” he points out. “I wish this hunger would go away. I’m
starving
.” He’s mildly feverish: the pangs and the hot chills running through him won’t let up no matter how much he eats. A stack of wrappers from all-day breakfast sandwiches litter the floor under his desk.

“It’s not fucking James Bond; who knew? I bet Oscar and Mhari aren’t being handled like this.”

“What, shoved off into an office with a bunch of health and safety manuals to memorize?” Alex considers for a moment: “I very much suspect that they
are
. This isn’t an accident, Evan. They’re—”

“They’re trying to bore us to death.” Evan gives up on his juggling, guides the stack of dice down to a safe landing in an eight-cube tower.

A couple of weeks ago it had been an impressive trick; now it strikes Alex as a distraction. He fingers the small, sealed locket they’ve given him to hang around his neck. The thing itches pretty much all the time now. “They don’t work the same way as an investment bank. Boredom is part of the process, at least at first: they’re trying to see if we act up. Didn’t you read section two?”

“What, the induction training process? They’re going to give us a sodding
aptitude test
to see if we have a predisposition towards formal logic? Then send us on a ten-week residential circle jerk that’s going to teach us the basics we need to embark on the study of applied computational demonology? Stuff like binary arithmetic, basic set theory, and predicate calculus?” Evan doesn’t try to keep the offended pride out of his voice. “Before assigning us trainee roles?”

Evan chews the inside of his cheek. “You can do that in your sleep,” he points out. “If you want out badly enough, you can fake incompetence. They’ll let you go.”

“Yes, but then I won’t
learn
anything. Anything new.”

“So.” Alex shrugs. He’s half-enjoying watching Evan climb the walls. Admittedly the training course is a bit of a joke; he or Evan could teach it themselves, in their sleep, except for the exotic and recondite bits relating to the actual praxis of summoning—the core elements of magic. They’re ready to leap on that topic and get their fangs into it, given the opportunity. But clearly nobody in this organization is prepared for such enthusiastic and talented inductees; or perhaps they have other reasons for taking things slowly. A bureaucracy is all about standardization, so that necessary tasks can be accomplished regardless of the abilities of the human resources assigned to it. And the Laundry is impressing Alex as being a remarkably mundane and plodding organization, given the nature of the adversaries it is required to deal with.

“Why don’t you relax? You’ve got an all-expenses-paid month-long vacation from the Scrum, even if you decide to blow off the training. And nobody’s going to say boo to us when we go back to work.” The novelty of having a guilt-free working holiday from work has gone right to Alex’s head: even having a vicar for a mentor strikes him as funny, now he’s over his reflexive fear of holy water.

“I’m hungry, too, dick-weed.” Evan gathers up his dice and sweeps them into his briefcase. Beside them it contains a couple of energy bars, his iPad, and a water bottle. (The iPad caused some trouble with building security until Mr. Howard intervened and explained the ground rules, and now it sports a hideous asset tag that proclaims UNSEC PRIVATE NOCLASS inside a disturbingly eye-warping silver star. The mere thought of trying to put secret information on it makes Alex feel ill.) “I am so out of here,” Evan adds.

“But it’s only six thirty! And it’s Tuesday!”

“Not a banker.” Evan grabs a jacket from the back of the office door. “I need some R&R time. Call me if you get bored.”

 • • • 

EVAN SLIPS OUT OF THE SIDE DOOR OF THE BUILDING, OUT PAST
the battered row of dumpsters and into the twilight of an alleyway. The van with blacked-out windows is waiting to whisk him to his apartment in Docklands. He leans back in the padded, comfortably dark capsule and closes his eyes, opening them only when the driver offers him a form to sign. Then he gets out and goes in through the front door to get changed for a night out on the town. He doesn’t notice the car parked with its lights turned off across the street from the building.

Alex, Evan thinks, is not merely a nerd—nerddom, and even a degree of Asperger’s syndrome, is entirely forgivable in the hothouse conditions of the Scrum—but a coward. He’s hungry, probably as hungry as Evan, but he won’t act. He’ll just sit there in a blue funk, shivering and complaining as the hunger gives him ulcers.

Evan happily embraces his inner geek, but harbors the conceit that he is an actor, a doer, not a sitter. He’s hungry. They are all—those he’s spoken to—hungry, having taken Mhari’s caution about feeding to heart. But there are limits, and this goes past anything that’s reasonable. They’ve told their HR contacts that they’re starving. And they’ve all received responses ranging from blank incomprehension to bovine fright and a promise to refer it to some sort of internal committee as soon as next month. Who will presumably look into the logistics of ordering blood donations from expired stock in the transfusion service and get around to it sometime in the next year, by which point the Scrum will resemble refugees from a death camp.

Evan’s been with the Bank nearly two years longer than Alex; long enough to climb the pay ladder a couple of increments, even if he hasn’t qualified for a major bonus yet. He’s got a very nice flat in a former Seaman’s Mission, and his eye on a Porsche Boxster after the bonus season. Evan pays a cleaning service to handle his clothing, along with his everyday mess: every day he gets home to find the laundry basket empty and the bed neatly turned back. It’s a lot like living in a gigantic hotel suite. Since the turn to the night side, he’s made special arrangements: had motorized blackout blinds installed inside all his windows, converted a cleaning closet into a panic room with a reinforced door frame and a futon on the floor.

When he gets home, Evan ditches his work kit (including the annoying necklace-gizmo), then undresses and showers briskly. Afterwards he sorts through his wardrobe for an outfit. He would normally inspect himself in the wardrobe’s floor-to-ceiling glass mirror, checking for imperfections, but that’s impossible now; instead, he has to use his computer’s webcam to show him a suitably rotated view of himself. He’s aiming for a blandly anonymous clubbable hipster look, just distinctively different enough from every other aspiring Silicon Roundabout wannabe to be hard to describe from memory: skinny sixties mad men go after-work casual with big horn-rimmed glasses. (Never mind the optically neutral lenses.) He nods to himself, smiles, and inspects his dental work. Then he opens the locked medicine cupboard in the bathroom and removes his works.