The Rhesus Chart (42 page)

The ultraviolet lights go out, and there is an immediate blood-curdling scream from the front office.

“What-what?” says Basil, turning and raising his gun.

 • • • 

THERE IS THIS THING ABOUT MATHEMATICIANS AND PROGRAMMERS
: they come in several flavors, often overlapping, but with distinct strengths and weaknesses specific to each type.

Alex’s talents are multivariate and recondite, but he has a particular aptitude for language lawyering. That is, he takes great delight in exploring the nooks and crannies of formal languages and understanding how and in what circumstances they exhibit side effects or anomalous behavior that a naive or inexperienced programmer would not expect.

Alex is also very intelligent. He is under Basil’s control, but he is not happy about his long-term survival prospects if this situation persists. Especially as his entire face is on fire and it feels as if his nose will fall off if he sneezes. Basil is not, in Alex’s estimate, an entirely thoughtful employer: certainly he is unlikely to prove as accommodating or merciful as the Laundry’s HR department.

Alex cannot disobey Basil’s direct order. But he can creatively interpret the instructions he has already been given. And he cannot help but overhear what Basil is saying next door.

And it occurs to him that when Basil said, “. . . stand by the door and kill anybody who comes through it,” Basil didn’t specify which direction they had to be going in.

In the normal state of affairs, a fight between a highly trained soldier from the Territorial SAS and a pencil-necked geek will tend to end with a de-leaded geek. But in the interests of rebalancing the equation, the highly trained soldier has just handed his principal weapon to the vampire overlord who has turned him into a shambling robot whose motivation is the overriding order to
turn out the bloody lights
rather than defending himself. And the pencil-necked geek is a fully juiced-up young vampire who has rules-lawyered himself around to some very interesting conclusions about his own freedom of action within the constraints Basil specified, and who is extremely pissed off right now because he has third-degree burns across most of his face.

Alex isn’t stupid. He lets the soldier pull the circuit breaker, and
then
he tries to kill him.

 • • • 

I DON’T REMEMBER THE NEXT BIT TOO CLEARLY.

The light flickered and something of its quality changed: it reddened, or lost something from the blue end of the spectrum.

There was a scream, and the nightmare figure turned towards the doorway and raised its gun. That’s when I began to turn, and raised my camera, and pushed the shutter release immediately: not even aiming at him, just relying on the firmware to lock onto the person-shaped object closest to the center of the focal area and do the rest.

I suspect I was in shock at this point, because my memory of the camera is that it felt as if it was made of solid tungsten, and my knees were shaking, and my vision was blurred and I could barely focus on the screen and I felt sick and hot and cold simultaneously. But that’s nothing compared to how Basil felt when I took his picture.

What happens when you point a basilisk gun at a semi-skeletonized vampire elder?

Basil
sparkles
electric blue for just a moment. There’s a loud
bang
! A fragment of skull whizzes past my ear. And then the pile of red-hot bones collapses across the floor, as does the submachine gun they were holding a fraction of a second ago. (Thankfully, there is no accidental discharge.) One of the hot pieces of bone lands on the edge of the warded bubble, and begins to burn a hole in the paper, scorching the letters and linkages away. The bubble flickers and vanishes, revealing an apprehensive-looking vicar contorted over a chair holding a child. (Thankfully, Basil’s instructions to Scary’s men have overridden my orders to shoot anything that comes out of the bubble.)

A voice calls, from the office: “Is Basil dead? Can I stop killing this guy yet?”

What?
“Yes, stop!” I shout.
On second thoughts
: “Alex, I want you to lie down, with your hands behind your back. Wrists together.” I realize I’m still pointing my deadly little camera at the opposite wall and force myself to lower it. I turn and see the soldiers turning away from the wall, shaking themselves and focussing. “Go and restrain him in case Sparkle Boy here implanted any post-mortem commands,” I tell them. “He’ll need burn support. I’m going to sort out the vicar.”

I’m shaking and shivery but I know what needs to be done. Pete is straightening up and saying something about untying the kid, about V syndrome and needing to get him to a hospital. I blink, feel the shuddering sense of exultation
that woman
would have taken at the moment Basil’s skull exploded, almost enough to give her a spontaneous orgasm—she hated him and lusted for him at the same time—and I bend over and spit on the floor, because I can taste blood on my lips. I’m soaking in the stuff, actually. I nearly throw up. It’s Steve Howe’s.
Poor bloody Steve.
It’s scant consolation knowing that if I’d gotten in front of him I’d have taken the vampire hunter’s booby-trap right in the face.

I stumble and go over on one ankle as I walk towards Pete. He’s saying something else now, something urgent, something about Basil storing his prey in the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY archive. I shake my head. Something is coming into focus, something huge and nasty and vile: Who added reviving MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY to the training-wheels project list, I wonder? As if I can’t guess. More importantly,
why
did Basil do it? “We’ve got to get back to the New Annex,” I say. Then I remember I’ve got a phone. “Wait.” I pull it out but iPhones don’t work too well when they’ve been sprayed with blood and rolled around on. “Shit.” I turn and stumble towards the front office, past the guys who are apologizing to Alex as they apply the handcuffs and leg restraints, ignore
that woman
, shuffle past the dead security guard who is staring unblinking at the ceiling with gunshot-wound eyes, and see his phone on the desk.

I lean over the corpse and dial a number from memory, finger shaking so badly that I have to stop and start over twice before I get it right. It’s picked up on the second ring.

“Operations.”

“Howard here.”

“Transferring you now—” They’ve been pre-briefed.

Two seconds later, I hear a familiar voice. “Speak, boy.” It’s Angleton. He sounds distracted.

I dry swallow, trying to ignore the taste in my mouth. “Code Red,” I manage.

We don’t use Code Red very often. In fact, I’ve never heard of it being used before. Code Blue means there’s an off-site emergency, probable hostile action on our soil. Code Red means there’s
on
-site hostile action. Like the attack I expect Basil to have arranged, to take out everyone who might suspect his existence.

“You’re a bit late,” Angleton says laconically. I hear banging in the background. “We’ll talk later,” he adds. Then the line goes dead.

THE CATASTROPHE UNFOLDED IN MY—AND MO’S—ABSENCE. IT
was rapid and devastating, and it’s quite possible that the only reason I’m around to record this account of the event is because I wasn’t there.

I feel compelled to raise my hand and admit that I’m partly to blame. I’m no more to blame than everyone else on the Senior Auditor’s ad-hoc working group, but no less. If we’d realized that Basil had infiltrated the DRESDEN RICE committee—hell, if it had occurred to us that our mole might come in the guise of an elderly, low-level administrative employee—we might have paid more attention to reducing the threat surface of the working group. But he’d been working his mind-fogging magic within our halls since before I was born. He predates the Senior Auditor; he was certainly here during the organization’s salad days as part of SOE during the Second World War. He predates
Angleton
. He was a careful planner, and although he operated at a relatively low level he had access to all our non-current HR files and declassified internal records. Consequently he got inside our event loop, with fatal consequences.

While we thought we were very cleverly mousetrapping our adversary at an off-site location of our choice, our adversary was simultaneously mousetrapping our away team . . . and tricking his oldest, deadliest enemy into a suicidal assault on the New Annex, promoted by a trickle of cunning lies and assisted by the loan of a warrant card, keys, and a floor plan.

Actually, this had been on the cards for a very long time. Months, certainly; possibly for years, maybe even for decades. After all, the first rule of vampires is, vampires don’t exist, and the elders take its enforcement as a matter of deadly importance. So a corollary of this rule is that any viable strategy for eliminating an old and powerful rival is going to be non-obvious.

There are a couple of long-term survival strategies open to the occult practitioner who has let the wrong symbiote in. One of these is to hunker down and squat, invisible, in the center of a miasmic mist of misleading magic that befuddles and bamboozles anybody who speculates about your existence. The leading proponent of this strategy, the strategy of the hedgehog, was the late Basil Northcote-Robinson, and it served him well—up to a point.

The other leading strategy is to turn the PHANGs’ ability to compel belief to the accretion of wealth and power, and to use those accumulated assets to build a pearl, layering protective nacre around your sand-grain heart. This strategy, the strategy of the fox, is the one that Old George Stephenson employed. What kind of vampire elder owns a founder’s stake in one of the nation’s largest investment banks? Answer: one who is not afraid to take risks in the pursuit of profit.

First Basil nudged us into taking Old George’s Scrum-shaped experiment away from him. Then he bamboozled Old George into loaning him not-Marianne the assassin, by presenting a common front. Finally, he removed himself from the firing line, warned Old George that the Laundry working group on PHANGs was coming for him, and thereby triggered a game of “let’s you and him fight.”

Foxes are fast movers—and they
bite
.

 • • • 

AT PRECISELY THREE MINUTES PAST SEVEN O’CLOCK, AT EXACTLY
the moment that I’m rolling around in Steven Howe’s intestines with ringing ears as a demented vampire hunter with a pistol and a selection of explosives tries to kill me, Old George launches an assault on the New Annex.

If he was able to call on the support of all his minions, you would not be reading this account of his attack; but Basil has cunningly stripped him of his deadliest proxies and waved the flag of an immediate threat before him. There is insufficient notice to prepare adequately for the offensive. Old George is therefore winging it.

Old George is very well-informed, for an outsider. He knows about the night watch. He knows about our alarm systems. Finally, Old George is armed for bear. He may be desperate, but he’s also a two-hundred-year-old ritual magician and occult practitioner who is immune to K syndrome,
and
a vampire on top.

At this time of evening the building is largely deserted. The cleaners have been and gone; a couple of night watch bodies roam the ground floor and basement level. Lights burn on the second floor, in a couple of briefing rooms and the duty officer’s den. So it is that when a black Mercedes pauses briefly outside the main entrance and a man gets out, nobody is paying enough attention to the external CCTV feed.

Old George wears a charcoal gray trench coat with its collar turned up, and a homburg pulled low over his ears. The trench coat conceals a multitude of sins, not least of which is a silk lining that Old George has embroidered by hand himself over a period of many months, with enough defensive wards and charms to armor an aircraft carrier. The hat has properties of its own, its brim casting a shadow that renders the wearer’s face unrecognizable. Anonymous and all but invisible, he marches up to the front door of the New Annex and touches the keypad. The pad smokes as he lets himself in.

In the darkness of the lobby, a shuffling caretaker hisses as it approaches the intruder. Old George has heard of these revenants, the Residual Human Resources that gave their all for the organization and now give even more, and he is amused to see the faint swirl of green luminosity within the sunken eyes of the shambler. “Lie down,” he suggests, not unkindly, and, reaching out with a gloved finger, he taps the night watchman on the forehead, right inside the span of its outstretched arms.

The corpse wheezes faintly as it collapses, the breath fleeing its flaccid lungs for the last time. Old George turns towards the staircase. Then he begins to climb.

 • • • 

GEORGE IS HERE BECAUSE BASIL HAS MANEUVERED HIM INTO A
coffin corner, and the shortest way out is through the Laundry with guns blazing.

This latest move in the game they’ve been playing for seven decades began almost by accident, with the Laundry’s move out of Dansey House. For the first time in more than half a century, Basil found himself unprotected by the subtle, powerful, and extensive geas that he had spent so much energy constructing—the compulsion to disbelieve in vampires. Many people would react to this as a threat. Basil, however, chose to view it as an opportunity.

Over the years, Old George has settled into a routine of sending his proxies to crush his enemies. Over the years, his proxies have become increasingly dangerous and unstable; the woman who is not called Marianne is the latest of these, a fearsome instrument of destruction—to vampires. Normally Basil would avoid both of them like the plague. There is nothing to be gained from messing around with Old George. But once outside the walls of Dansey House, a plan suggests itself to him:

1. Tempt Old George to create a nest of baby vamps.
   
2. Bring them into the Laundry, who will ultimately realize that Old George is their creator . . .
   
3. . . . Thereby threatening to overturn the law of secrecy.
   
4. Borrow not-Marianne on the pretext of suffocating the babies; seduce her with the gift of fresh meat, buying her temporary collusion.
   
5. Stripped of his most powerful catspaw, Old George is now in a position where he can only silence the security threat by attacking an organization he has been aware of (but has avoided any connection to) for a very long time.
   
6. Make sure that Old George believes Basil to be on the premises when, in fact, Basil is elsewhere at the time of the attack.
   

If Old George is killed, Basil will shed no tears. And if Old George succeeds, those of us who might expose Basil will be eliminated. From Basil’s point of view it’s a win-win situation.

It’s cold-blooded, of course. But it’s hard to make an omelette without breaking eggs.

 • • • 

I FIND IT VERY HARD TO WRITE THIS ACCOUNT OBJECTIVELY.

So I am going to quote extensively from the report of the board of enquiry, with added comments of my own.

 • • • 

AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS OLD GEORGE PAUSED TO ORIENT
himself. Then he turned and headed down the corridor between the Operational Research Unit offices on one side and the Admin and Facilities cubicle farm on the other. Turning right he came to the general office fronting the Department of External Affairs, and here he encountered Doris Greene from Health and Safety.

We do not know exactly what Doris was doing outside Briefing Room 203, which was occupied at the time by the task alpha group established by the Senior Auditor to which she had been assigned. For obvious reasons, CCTV coverage of the New Annex premises stops at the front door. Jez Wilson indicated at the enquiry that she believes Doris was simply taking a break to powder her nose, but cannot provide definite confirmation for this theory. Certainly to get to the nearest ladies’ toilet from Briefing Room 203, Doris would have had to turn right, walk past Briefing Rooms 204 to 210, descend the north staircase, turn left through the fire doors, and go through the corridor leading past the DEA cluster, which is exactly where her body was found.

Doris Greene (aged 56), leaves a husband, Martin (age 59), and three children, Peter (aged 31), Emma (aged 29), and Carol (aged 26).

Old George did not pause to feed or attempt to coerce his victims into obedience. He merely touched them with a fingertip and killed them. His touch carried an abstruse contagion, an anti-pattern for life—an invocation of a kind that can only be generated by someone who has consumed far too much of it. No soul-eating is involved: victims are simply thrown away, minds shredded, brains stilled, hearts stopped. There is no indication that Doris Greene offered (or was capable of offering) any resistance.

The board of enquiry located the next body just beyond the second-floor fire doors fronting the north stairwell, in the corridor outside the door to Briefing Room 210.

Four bullet holes were found, in two groups, in the left fire door. The gun that fired them, a standard issue Glock 17, was found in the right hand of Mr. Andrew Newstrom. One round was chambered and twelve more rounds were found to be present in the 17-round extended-capacity magazine after the weapon was made safe by forensic investigators. The ammunition load consisted of alternating rounds of hollow-point 9x19mm Parabellum and our own standard banishment rounds (essentially FMJ 9mm with an embedded banishment circuit in the base of the bullet). Examination of the spent rounds confirmed that the banishment circuits of the two bullets retrieved from the wall beyond the fire door were discharged by contact with a ward of class 6 or higher strength.

The board’s conclusion is that the likely course of events was that Mr. Newstrom left Briefing Room 202 for reasons unknown, encountered Old George, and engaged him with his personal defense weapon at close range. He had time to fire four rounds and hit the target repeatedly, but the combined effect of the translocative compulsion wired into Old George’s coat effectively rendered his target physically immaterial to bullets. Old George advanced at walking pace, covering six meters of physical distance, and touched Mr. Newstrom before he could fire again.

Andy Newstrom, aged 47, leaves a wife, Sandra (age 49), and two children, Alec (15) and Olivia (11).

Fifteen meters farther down the corridor, the door to room 203 was locked. Briefing Room 203 was occupied at the time of the incident by Jez Wilson and Gerald Lockhart, who had returned empty-handed from his errand to retrieve Oscar Menendez. The board’s findings note that Wilson and Lockhart survived the incident principally due to their quick thinking in locking the door in response to the shots fired by Mr. Newstrom. As a result, Old George bypassed room 203. The board finds that neither Lockhart nor Wilson were equipped to survive a confrontation with Old George, or to impede his progress. Had they attracted the attention of the intruder, or attempted to engage him, they would certainly be numbered among the dead.

(Jez and Gerry were frantically piling furniture behind the door at precisely the moment my call to the duty officer’s room connected.)

The next body was found just outside Briefing Room 203. It belonged to Dr. Judith Carroll, the ranking Auditor with internal affairs, and second in command to Dr. Michael Armstrong.

Indications of intense thaumaturgic discharge were found around this body. Dr. Carroll’s ward of office was discharged: in the process it combusted and the metal trimmings melted. The body was extensively burned. Scorch marks were found on the walls and ceiling to either side, as well as on the body. A residual high thaum count renders a three-meter section of the corridor hazardous for traversal, and extensive decontamination and exorcism will be required if the second-floor corridor is to be rendered safe for normal use.

From the position of the corpse and adjacent spatter patterns, it is inferred that Dr. Carroll left Briefing Room 202 when she heard Mr. Newstrom open fire on Old George. A confrontation then ensued. During this confrontation, Dr. Carroll activated her entire repertoire of personal defense macros and spells. In doing so she caused extensive damage to Old George’s coat and disabled the geometry engine supporting its translocative compulsion field. From this point on, Old George was no longer immune to gunfire. Old George attempted to apply his thanotic anti-pattern to Dr. Carroll. Dr. Carroll’s ward short-circuited it, in the process discharging completely and, per subsequent evidence, inflicting fifth-degree (bone-deep) burns on Old George’s right hand and forearm.