The Rhesus Chart (36 page)

“Huh.” Mhari puts her fork down. At last. I relax infinitesimally. When she was getting worked up a few minutes ago I was half-convinced she was going to stab me in the eye. “You’ve changed more than I thought, Bob.”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “Haven’t we both?”

“Well.” She looks at me speculatively. I notice that her pupils are dilated: I seem to have got her attention.

“There are a couple of other angles to cover,” I add.

“Such as?”

“Firstly. That fucking reading assignment. I want it off the agenda.”

“The reading—” She pauses. Sighs dramatically, miming disappointment, as she pulls the tattered shreds of normality back together. “Spoilsport.”

“You’re the chair. I do
not
want a teacher’s black mark for failing a homework assignment. But if you want me to help save your ass I don’t need the distraction.”

“Well, if you put it that way . . . What was the other thing?”

“Oh, nothing significant.” I glance away from her face for a moment. “Just, I’m fairly sure someone is going to try to kill you. I mean, kill all the PHANGs. It’s the only explanation for what’s going on. Trouble is, I’m not sure who’s going to do it, or why. So, um, I’m going to have to keep an eye on you. I don’t expect them to try anything violent at first; using the committee to starve you into going rogue would be a much better tool . . . But we need to keep up appearances. I don’t want to spook whoever it is before I can identify them. So if you could avoid mentioning this to the others just yet?” I reach into my pocket and pull out a small jewelry box and pass it across the table to her.

“What—”

“Open it.” She opens the box. Normally I like watching pretty women open boxes containing rings I’ve just given them. It’s not something I get to do very often, truth be told. But this is business not pleasure, and I catch Mhari’s frown as she stares at it. “Yes, that’s a sympathetic link you can feel. Go on, put it on.” She slides it onto her right middle finger, an unadorned loop of silver. I haul out the matching ring and try and work it onto my admittedly thicker digit. “This is the other one. Pinch it—ouch! Yes, like that.”

“What’s it for?” she asks.

I shove a form across the table towards her. “Sign here, twice. Yes, against the Xs. It’s so that if someone tries to kill you, you can contact me. In fact, if someone tries to kill you it’ll let me know even if you’re unconscious.”
Or dying,
I don’t add. “And it’ll let me find you.”

“What’s wrong with the phone?”

“A fearless vampire hunter is chasing you with a stake and you’ve got time to phone me? This is simpler, is all. Also, it doesn’t rely on batteries and it works in mobile phone black spots and on the underground.”

“Okay.” She passes me the paperwork and slides the box into her handbag. A curious expression crosses her face. “I can’t believe you just gave me a ring and I put it on.”

“Would it have changed anything if I’d done it ten years ago?” I ask.

“Probably not.” She stares into some inner distance, then calls for the bill. “But who knows?”

 • • • 

I’M IN A HUDDLE/INFORMAL CONCLAVE/MEETING WITH ANDY AND
Pete when the phone rings.

It’s late afternoon, the day after my questionable date. I spent the morning, as threatened, dealing with various bits of paperwork and then trying to work out a possible protocol for how we might organize necessary blood bank supplies for a small cell of PHANGs with minimum risk of public exposure, minimum risk of private embarrassment—we are going to have to run this past the Auditors with an eye to legality and compliance with the operations code, for starters, and don’t get me going on how feeding blood from terminal patients to vampires is going to play out in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years on the medical ethics side—and minimum risk of being derailed by any idiots with axes to grind and an unreasoning prejudice against bloodsucking creatures of the night. Then I broke for lunch (don’t get me started on the spaghetti bolognese, either), and then an efficiently run session chaired by an unusually subdued Mhari.

I
played nice.
She
played nice. I wish the same could be said of the other delegates. Old what’s-his-name, Basil Northcote-Robinson from Archives, seems determined to make a big joke of the whole thing. Every time Mhari or I tried to convince him that PHANGs are a serious subject, he found an excuse to turn it into a reminiscence about his time in the army right after the Second World War, doing something dodgy with SIGINT in Romania. Or to talk about the time he got to shake hands with Boris Karloff. And the others on the committee kept playing along. I’m coming to the conclusion that whatever causes the disbelief is a powerful but very low-key, persistent geas. If it was splattered all over Dansey House as part of that annoying contamination problem they’re dealing with, that would explain why I can’t pick up any signs of it in the New Annex. It would also explain why the oldsters are so damned intransigent: they’ve been picking up subliminal nudges for forty-five years.

In the end, during a particularly hysterical (not) digression (during which Doris Greene from H&S tiresomely explains that vampires really
don’t
exist and if they did it would be Too Bad, because they’d have to wear surgical masks, gowns, and eye shields at all times because of the risk of blood-born contamination; I think she’s mistaking them for Hep-C patients or something), I manage to catch Mhari’s gaze. Which is difficult when her eyes are rolling. But we make eye contact nonetheless, and she nods, and I can tell she gets it because at the end of the session she stays behind. “I know what you’re thinking,” she says, as the coffin-dodgers shuffle through the door, leaving us alone.

“Yeah. Listen, your list looks good to me. There are a couple of things I’d like to add to it, but it’s a good start.”

“Oh I am
so
relieved.” She winces and clutches her forehead theatrically. “And?”

“My protocol. Do you think it could work?”

“I think there’s an element of ‘and now a miracle happens’ in the process for extracting samples, somewhere between organizing a hospital liaison and sorting out a regular courier run. But I want to believe.”

“So. Wanna take it to email?”

Mhari finally smiles. “I like it when you talk dirty.”

“Listen, you’re the chair. Co-opt me as secretary and we can kick it around until we both agree to it. Then we hold another meeting, feed the peanut gallery the edited highlights, let them spin some more war stories, then get everyone to sign off on it.”

“I think that’s a great idea.” She narrows her eyes and stares at me. “Why are you being so proactively helpful all of a sudden?”

“Because it’s necessary. For the organization.”

“No, I mean why are you. Being so, um, cooperative?”

I blink.
She still thinks it’s personal . . . ?
“Would you rather I nursed grudges?”

“I was afraid of it. I guess.” She gives a little self-deprecating laugh. “Well, got to be going. I have minutes to write up. And then another meeting. They’re keeping me busy, bringing me up to speed on changes to management appeals processes.”

“I’ve got to go, too,” I say. “Take care. And if you see something . . .”

“Say something. Right.” She smiles, and reveals her teeth. The canines are gleaming again: I guess the cosmetic dentistry doesn’t last forever. (Maybe they’re like rodents? Continuously growing?) “I’m a grown-up, Bob. Of course I’ll call you.”

“Bob?” says Pete. I snap back to the here-and-now.

“Yeah?” I say.

“What happened?” he asks.

“What? Um. Well.” I gather my thoughts. “Nobody believes in vampires. Our monitoring program that keeps an eye open for them was shut down forty-plus years ago. Then around four to eight weeks ago three things happen simultaneously: a whole bunch of vampires appear
ab initio
in an external organization. One of our former HR people
just happens
to be in a senior-ish position in the Scrum. And I
somehow
end up pulling a part-time data mining project that is designed to flag early warning signs of vampirism. I emphasize: all of this happens at
the same time
.

“Let me speculate. Someone in the organization has been aware of vampires all along. Probably because they are one. Quite possibly, being infested with the V-symbiont confers immunity to K syndrome—in which case, becoming a vampire might be an occupational hazard for ritual practitioners. One with an upside to balance the downside, if they’re sufficiently ruthless.

“So, let’s posit a very old, very ruthless sorcerer embedded within the Laundry. For a long time they’ve been running a very low-level geas, probably the source of the contamination under Dansey House. We can construct a number of narratives that start this way. For example: recently they decided it was a good idea to do some research into their condition, and the best way to do this was by, well. We know it’s a memetic parasite. Think the wrong thoughts and you, too, could grow fangs and catch fire in sunlight. So they looked around for a suitable petri dish to culture vampires in. And of course you don’t mess around with lethally dangerous infections without keeping a means of sterilizing it to hand. I was, I guess, intended both to deliver a report on the experiment and to, uh, recycle the petri dish? Someone with access to my long-ago HR file would know about me and Mhari getting along like a house on fire, complete with the screaming and smoke inhalation.” Andy looks at me. “Yes?”

“You’re still here and they’re still here,” he points out.

“Yup. So let’s spin another yarn. A different vam—sorcerer, outside the Laundry, experiments with minions. They decide to generate a bunch of baby vamps as enforcers for some reason. Our vamp, inside the Laundry, decides to take their toys away from them, by inserting Mhari into it and drawing the side effect of their feeding to my attention.”

Pete looks at me. “Isn’t this a bit far-fetched?”

“Normally I’d say so,” I agree. “But it all lines up, and it’s much too
neat
. And there are too many tight links in the chain. It’s almost as if it was designed as a plausible cover story for something else—”

That’s when the phone rings.

I pick it up. “Bob speaking.”

“Bob.” It’s Angleton. “BLUE DANDELION is open again. Are you alone?”

I glance around. “I’m with Andy and Pete. I can have them leave—”

“Not necessary. Is Alex Schwartz around? Mhari Murphy? Any of the PHANGs?”

“No.” Suddenly I’m hunched over. Andy watches me, eyes narrow; Pete merely looks resigned, as if he thinks this is just another case of bad telephonic etiquette cutting a casual conversation dead.

“All right. Meet me in the lobby immediately. I need you to come with me to make an identification.”

Oh
fuck
. That does not sound good. “Right.” I pause. “Anything for Andy or Pete?”

“Ask them not to go home until we’re back. We should not be long.”

“Okay. Bye.” I hang up. “That was Angleton. I have to go off-site for a while. Not long. He says you should both stay here until I get back—I think he intends to rope you in on whatever this is later.”

“What does that mean?” Pete complains.

“Hope he’s wrong and you don’t find out,” Andy says darkly. “Good luck, Bob.”

“Hope I don’t need it,” I say. Then I grab my jacket and smartphone and run for the stairs.

 • • • 

I MEET ANGLETON IN THE LOBBY. “WHAT’S UP?” I ASK.

He strides towards the front door, trench coat flapping around his knees. “You’ll see.” The usual expression of arch amusement is missing from his gaunt face right now. He looks—old? Tired? Ill-at-ease? All of these things, I decide. Which is bad for my stomach, but not as bad as the crimson police BMW with the yellow stripes and the flashing blue lights that’s waiting for us with a heavy from SCO19 leaning against it beside the open door.

“You Angleton and Howard?” asks the cop. He doesn’t look terribly amused.

I pull out my warrant card, carefully not moving too fast. Unlike most British cops this one has a holstered pistol to go with his bulletproof vest, and there’s undoubtedly an exciting collection of things that go bang in the locked safe in the car boot. “I’m Angleton,” says Angleton. “He’s Howard. I gather we’re needed at . . .” He gives an address, somewhere in the East End.

“Okay, hop in.” The officer passes my warrant card back and looks at me, checking my face against the photograph. “We’ll have you there in no time.”

That’s when I realize how serious this is: the Met charge top dollar for their services as a taxi firm, especially when automatic weapons are along for the ride. Also, there’s a dress code for the back of this limo—uniform or handcuffs—and we’re breaking it. Our interlocutor climbs in the front next to the driver, and we barely have time to shut the doors before he switches on the disco lights and sound system and floors it. It’s not a terribly comfortable way to travel, but it’s the third fastest way to get around London—after helicopters and motorbikes—and it’s astonishing how the buses and taxis get out of your way when you’ve got lights, sirens, and submachine guns on your side.

Barely fifteen minutes later we pull up in a very tidy residential street, outside an imposing chunk of Victorian masonry that’s clearly been converted into posh apartments. They’re not so upmarket right now, with police incident tape strung around the railings and doorways. A couple of constables are on hand, bitching into their wallyphones as they stand by to check IDs for the upset residents who will be coming home from work to find their des res is a crime scene. Angleton strides over to the nearest PC. “Which flat is it?” he asks briskly.

“Can I see your—oh, it’s
you
guys.” The cop gives me the hairy eyeball. “Him, too?” I pull out my warrant card. “Okay, it’s Flat Four. Go on in, the front door’s locked open. Don’t mess with the crime scene unless you want the inspector to shout at you.” He turns away.

I follow Angleton up the front steps. “What was that about?” I ask.

“None of your business, boy.” He seems amused about something. I shrug and follow him up the stairs, pausing to stand aside as a couple of SOCOs in bunny suits shuffle downstairs, almost doubled over under the weight of their cameras and bashed gear bags.