The Rhesus Chart (8 page)

I watch him, but he doesn’t look surprised. He just sits there, marinating in the ambiance of my most secret office, nostrils flaring at the faint pong of
essence de spook
.

I crack first. “If we talked about it, it would scare people,” I tell him.

“Stuff like that piece of apocrypha you emailed me last month?” he asks.

“Yes.” I unwind infinitesimally. “It’s our job to protect people from, from that sort of thing. And worse.” I instinctively glance towards my bookcase. There, sitting in front of a pile of CS textbooks, is a Bible. It’s the one the Golden Promise Ministries used, with added special sauce in the apocrypha. I make a judgment call and pass it to him. “I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to talk about what happened out there, but here’s the original source material.” Or rather, a copy we bargained with the Black Chamber—our American opposite numbers—for. Not that they had any reason to withhold it after we saved their ass.

Pete holds the Bible uncertainly, as if he’s afraid its cover is coated in contact poison. “They told me their last expert on Aramaic studies and Biblical apocrypha died some years ago. And would I mind very much taking on that role on a part-time consultative basis, as and when.”

“Yes.” I didn’t know about the
last expert
angle, but it sets my mind at rest somewhat. “How about we get a mug of coffee and I show you around?”
Whatever you’re cleared for, once I’ve established your access controls,
I add silently, for my own benefit.

“Coffee would be great. But as for the tour . . . I’m not sure it’s necessary.” He looks slightly sheepish. “They told me they won’t be needing me here routinely; I’m supposed to look at your archives and learn the procedures for accessing files and, um, that’s all for now and they’ll call me if anything comes up.” He makes a dust-off gesture with his left hand.

“That’s probably all for the best.” I stand and lead the way towards the coffee station. “It’s not as if you don’t already have a job, is it?”

“A vocation, actually. But yes.”

He ambles along behind me like an oversized penguin, glancing amiably from side to side, taking it all in: the heart of the secret state, all puke-green paint, chipped lino, and LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS posters left over from the last war but one. (Our decor is so cheesy it’s almost regained a hipster-ish modicum of cool.)

“So is it true, then? That you single-handedly turned back an alien invasion of tentacle monsters who were being summoned by our dispensationalist brethren with the non-standard user manual?”

I wince. “Is that what they told you? Because if—”

“—Not in
quite
so many words—”

“—so they exaggerated my—”

“—but they were quite effusive about—”

“—success what?”

I grind to a halt, two doors past the gents, and take a deep breath.

“I’m not James Bond, Pete. Just a bad occasional stunt-double. For the extras,” I add, before he gets the wrong end of the stick. “You know, the ones who get beaten up?” I cross my arms defensively, wrapping a hand around my upper right bicep, which has a curious rectangular dent in it. (Covered by a skin graft about ten centimeters long, a souvenir from some very unpleasant people I met a couple of years ago.) “It’s nothing like as romantic as movies or TV make it out to be. Or books, dammit.”

“But you’re in the job of protecting us from . . .”

“Yes, exactly.” I start walking again. Round the bend, then we come to the coffee station. “We tend to pool mugs here.” I grab a couple of chipped promotional beakers left over from a long-defunct minicomputer vendor and slop the evil-smelling brew into them.
Milk, one sugar,
I remember on Pete’s behalf. “Seriously, I didn’t want to trouble you with that stuff. But I was out of options and you were the only person I knew who stood a hope of delivering an interpretation in time. Looks like Upstairs agreed with me, unfortunately, which is why it’s entirely my fault you’re drinking London’s worst institutional coffee right now. I owe you a huge, groveling apology—”

“No you don’t.”

“What?”

Pete waves his mug around, eyes gleaming: “This is amazing! It’s all real!”

“Um?” His response is so enthusiastic, and so unexpected, that he’s reduced me to monosyllables. That’s a
bad
sign.

“Bob. First of all, I like to think that the most important point of my vocation is
helping
people. Helping with grief, with love, with faith, with life’s challenges. You’ve given me a
better
way to help
more
people. Do you really expect me to object to that? And secondly, you’ve given me some pause for reappraisal. The demon business, the whole nightmare monsters from beyond spacetime thing, the zombies: yes, I can see why you might expect that to shake my faith in God’s love. But don’t you think that’s a little superficial? There’s another way of looking at them, which is as evidence that the supernatural exists and is important. Where God fits into all of this I can’t say, but I
can
say that these so-called elder gods don’t invalidate His existence. They don’t prove a negative. If anything they make God’s message of love
more
important, in a human context.”

I take a mouthful of lukewarm bunker-oil-flavored cow piss and try not to gag as my Weltanschauung strips its gears. His optimism is sunny, invincible, and just slightly pitiable. I’m about to open my mouth and say something inadvisable when I realize that, actually, I don’t want to do that. I may be turning into a cynical old fart, but that’s no reason to drag down everyone around me at the same time. So I open my mouth and say something else instead: “I think I can agree with the sentiment, if not the details.” Then, moving swiftly on, “But they wouldn’t have dragged you in here just for a mug of coffee, would they?”

“No. They said they want me to know where the archive stacks are, and how to access them. Then I’ve got what they called a ‘training wheels’ assignment, after which I go back in the box until they need me.” He sniffs, mildly disapproving. “It’s supposed to demonstrate competence with the library system, I gather.
After
I told them about my doctorate.”

“Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. “They’re big on that. Assuming the ‘they’ we are talking about is someone in Induction and Training . . . ?”

“Does Ellen McQueen ring a bell?”

“Yes, yes it does.” I shrug. “Did she give you a time scale or a classification level for this assignment?” I begin walking slowly back towards my office.

“Yes: it’s open-ended and the material is intended for public dissemination when the time comes—meanwhile, it’s considered confidential. Is that . . . ?”

“Huh. The confidential bit is reasonable; no offense, but we don’t hand secret materials to trainees, even if they’ve passed positive vetting. But open-ended?”

“Apparently it’s expected to take some time. ‘You are not expected to finish this job,’ she said. Those were her exact words.”

“What—?” I think for a moment. “That doesn’t make any kind of sense to me. What did she say you were to do?”

“There was some sort of civil defense program from the 1970s called PROTECT AND SURVIVE, she said. That was back during the Cold War. It was a booklet and posters and a bunch of recorded radio and TV broadcasts about how to survive a nuclear attack, and in event of a war situation breaking out they were going to distribute the booklets and run the broadcasts. Sort of a public information thing, I gather, although the main effect was to drive graphic designers to suicide.” He chuckles.

“Oh dear fricking . . .” What he’s telling me finally sinks in. “You mean the Laundry has a public information campaign stored up and ready to roll in event of CASE—sorry, in event of us being invaded by tentacle monsters from another dimension?”

“Yes! That’s exactly it. Only it was last updated in 1983. ‘Take a look at it,’ she said, ‘and write a proposal for bringing it up to date.’”

“Did it have a name, this project?”

“Yes. The books and posters are called MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY, but she said I’d find it in the stacks under a very strange reference—KGB.2.YA—what’s so funny? Bob? Are you choking? Bob? Bob? Do you need help?”

Kiss Good-Bye 2 Your Ass: I
love
the Laundry sense of humor.

“I’m okay,” I finally wheeze as I exhale the last of my half-lungful of coffee. “Let’s go check it out.”

KGB.2.YA. How bad can it be?

 • • • 

IN THE END WE GO BACK TO MY OFFICE, WHEREUPON A COUPLE
of emails and a phone call confirm that Pete has actually been sent an orientation pack (not arrived yet) and assigned to my guest chair for the next week. Doubtless this is my punishment for increasing the departmental headcount and simultaneously downsizing our office floorspace with Angleton’s help. (I gather Andy is still in full-on Office Flying Dutchman mode . . .) “Looks like we’re hot-desking or something,” I explain. “Let’s do lunch and I’ll take you to the archives afterwards.”

The Dansey House refurbishment may be stalled, but the archive stacks, deep beneath the basement, are still in business. They’re built inside segments of deep-running tube tunnels that were excavated before and after the Second World War, to double as air raid shelters and blitz-proof government offices. Nuclear weapons made them obsolete for their original purpose and the London Underground never asked to have their tube station back, so we hung on to it and filled it with microfiche cards and, latterly, storage servers. You thought the gigantic new London water mains were installed to supply the capital with drinking water? Well, yes they were—but only after we’ve used them as a heat sink for our equipment racks.

But we don’t end up in the deep stacks. Before lunch I take Pete to visit old Basil in Archives to ask for the shelf locator of KGB.2.YA. This is necessary because Basil is one of our pensioners—the ones who don’t retire so much as they subside into the furniture—and the most advanced technology he can operate reliably is his hearing aid (which whistles irritatingly, like a mosquito scraping its fingernails down a blackboard). He doesn’t answer his email, instant messaging might as well be rocket science, and a voice call is inevitably frustrated by the intermittently faulty induction loop on his desk phone. Luckily Basil is okay if you visit him in person, so I procure a map and a signed authorization chitty before taking Pete to the canteen for lunch (British Institutional Keg Curry and naan for me, beans on toast for him).

Afterwards, back in my office: “You have got to be shitting . . . sorry.” I peer at the hand-scrawled carbon-copy again, double-checking it. “You’re sure that was the right reference?”

Pete rummages in the ring binder that Trish inflicted on him when he arrived. “Yes, that’s the one.”

“Well, it’s in a warehouse in Watford, most of the way out to the M25. I didn’t even know we
had
a warehouse in Watford. It’ll take us three hours to get there and back by tube, so I suppose—”

“I brought the Vespa.” Pete diffidently jangles a bunch of keys. “Can you ride pillion?”

Vicars on vintage scooters; what is the world coming to? (I’m just glad I don’t have hemorrhoids.)

Pete has parked in an alley round the back of the New Annex, between two dumpsters full of non-office waste. It’s raining, and I’m glad I decided to wear a parka to work, even though it makes me look like a dork. He passes me a spare helmet and I’m busy fiddling with the chin strap when I get a peculiar feeling that I’m being watched.

I open an inner eye and whip my head around. There’s a startled hiss and a black bolt of lightning scoots under the nearer dumpster. It’s not a feeder, nor is it a human intruder. I gulp with relief. Green eyes flash at me from the shadows, then retreat into darkness.

“What’s up?” Pete asks, noticing my startle reflex.

“Just a stray cat.” Maybe feral.
I need to stop jumping at shadows,
I think. “Let’s go.”

I have heard that the second fastest way to get around central London is on two wheels. Well, if your range needs to encompass the entire area within the M25 orbital motorway, you either need Lance Armstrong’s prescription cabinet or a motor. Pete gives me a demonstration of the latter. We make it out to Watford in less than half an hour, faster than I could have managed even given a bicycle and access to the ley-line paths of power that thread the capital’s disused railways and cuttings. Unfortunately I also discover that riding pillion in the rain without leathers is a great way to get soaked to the skin and chilled, and while I don’t get car-sick or plane-sick I am quite capable of getting nauseous on the back of a scooter.

Nevertheless, Pete gets us there in miraculously short order. We dismount in a car park round the side of an anonymous-looking industrial unit with roll-ups, and I stumble dizzily towards the windowless door. There is a doorbell, and a small camera. I ring the bell and present my warrant card to the camera. After a moment, Pete remembers to pull out his shiny new ID. It doesn’t come with the special sauce yet, but at least it’ll get him in the door if he’s accompanied by an irresponsible adult.

“’Ooozare?”

“Bob Howard and Pete Wilson, Capital Laundry Services.”

“C’min.”

There’s a buzz, and I push the door open. The office inside is tiny, occupied by the middle-aged security guard who was playing solitaire on his phone when I interrupted his brilliantly exciting afternoon. “Yus?” he asks resentfully.

“We called ahead.” I try not to look disapprovingly at his game: rule #1 of working at remote offices is never to piss off site security. “We need access to the stores.” I hold up the slightly rusty key ring I checked out from Archives Reception, and Pete produces a file from somewhere inside his bulky leather jacket and slides out an authorization form.

“G’wan in. You gointa be long?”

“Don’t know yet.” I glance at Pete, make eye contact, and nod infinitesimally. “We’ll let you know. When do you go off-shift?”

“I gotta be out by five.”

“Okay. If we’re still going, knock on the door ten minutes before you’re ready to leave and we’ll wrap up.”

“Lemme see that badge again?”