The Apocalypse Codex (35 page)

Anyway, that’s why they send me on these missions. As my ex-boss Andy put it, “Would you rather we gave the job to someone who
enjoyed
it?”

It’s bad enough when I have to do smelly stuff that lands someone else in the shit. TL;DR version is, I hate killing, and I try to find any possible shadow of an excuse to avoid doing it. (And so does my wife.)

…Which is why it feels very peculiar, not to mention distressing, to be in this position.

Schiller’s ministry is clearly messing with very dangerous powers. That Bible alone would have been enough to justify shutting him down with extreme prejudice, and as for the rest—the brain parasites, the baby farm Persephone stumbled across, not to mention the Fimbulwinter weather and the Sleeper in the Pyramid—all of those are enough to justify bringing the hammer down
hard
.

I don’t like the term “collateral damage”; it trivializes agony and dismemberment, mourning and grief. (
You
try telling the bereaved survivors that you had to kill their family and friends to protect their freedom. See how you like what they say to you.) But if any situation justifies the use of extreme force, this comes close. If Schiller’s misguided attempt to wake the Gatekeeper (Is Schiller
really
so naive he believes that abomination is Jesus Christ?) succeeds, everyone in the world will pay the price. These things are not demons or gods: they’re ancient intelligences from other corners of the cosmos that are normally inaccessible and inhospitable to our kind. When they get into our world they are as inclined to mercy towards us as cats are towards mice. We make splendid toys for their amusement, until we break.

If Schiller is really trying to conduct a great summoning with the Apocalypse Codex as a reference manual, someone has to shut the gate down before he levers it wide enough to summon his master—a process which probably involves mass human sacrifice, because these nitwits are generally too theory-impaired to realize that if they want to make a nuclear explosion there are more efficient ways to do it than banging two lumps of highly enriched uranium together by hand. And unless the Seventh Cavalry—that would be the Nazgûl—make it over the hill in time, that duty devolves on
me
. Because I’m apprenticed to the Eater of Souls (and how’s that for a job description? Junior Assistant Under-Secretary For Eating Of Souls, Fourth Grade) and they made me sign for Pinky’s pocket consumer implementation of SCORPION STARE, the original basilisk gun in a box—so I guess from the outside I look like some kind of super-powerful government assassin.

While all the time I’m brokenly repeating inside, like an old-time cracked record,
fuck me, I’ve drawn the hangman’s straw. Again.

TRY LOOKING AT IT FROM SOMEONE ELSE’S POINT OF VIEW:

Persephone drives slowly into the teeth of the twilight, peering suspiciously at the road from behind wipers that sweep across the windscreen with a rhythmic thud, shoveling the driving snow into the chilly night.

The liaison officer from External Assets slumps next to her in the passenger seat. His face is turned away. He could almost be sleeping, but occasionally he raises a hand to scratch alongside his nose or delivers some other sign of sentience. The other hand rests, palm down, on the small cardboard pizza box in his lap.

The weather is unnerving. Huge snowflakes, fingernail-sized, drift from a sky that dawn has barely brightened to the color of dull slate, warmed by a brassy tint that bespeaks more snow to come. There’s little wind and the flakes drop steadily, dulling the sound of traffic from outside the coupé and reducing visibility to a couple of hundred meters.

The municipality snowplows are out and the roads are gritted. Even so, the fresh snow is filling in tire tracks in front of her eyes. Denver gets snow and people hereabouts know how to drive in the stuff, but the sidewalks and trees are already blanketed thickly, and it’s getting heavier.

There’s a ramp onto the interstate, clogged with sluggish traffic shuffling south. It moves in fits and starts. She glances sideways at Howard again. A civil service chinless wonder, Johnny thought. Well, the chinless wonder in question broke out through a snatch squad and evaded capture as neatly as any field op in the Network. And the chinless wonder seems to harbor ideas about leading from the front, not dropping the people he thinks he’s responsible for in the sticky stuff. And he’s inclined to go for the throat when confronted with a fight/flight choice. All in all, he’s shaping up extremely positively as far as Persephone’s personnel review is concerned. But…
holiday snaps
? He’s joking, he’s mad, or he’s holding something back. And she knows which she’d put her money on.

Persephone checks her rearview again, then squints into the falling curtain of snow. A big rig looms up out of the haze on her right, stationary on the hard shoulder. Snow is already mounding up across its hood as she rolls past it in a wave of slush, maintaining a steady forty. A lunatic in an SUV is coming up too damned fast on the left, but at least he won’t be yacking on his cellphone on the way to work. “Mr. Howard. Is your phone getting a signal yet?”

Howard’s hand moves to his coat pocket. “Nope.” He stares at the iPhone for a while before sliding it away again. “Thaumometer’s still hot ahead of us, though.”

Persephone compares his announcement to her mental map, lurid gold and yellow highlights gleaming like Midas’s curse, and finds that the spike of power that marks the portal is right where he said. “Check.”

She scans her rearview again. “About the target. Once Patrick notifies the Black Chamber, what do you think we should do?”

Her passenger cogitates for a few seconds. “That depends. If the Nazgûl tell us they’ll handle it—then, I think, at that point we should leave as fast as we can. Assuming we’re able to, of course. At that point, it’s their baby.”

“And if they don’t? Or if we can’t contact them?”

Howard sighs. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get—”

There are red-and-blue lights flashing up ahead. Another big rig has slid off the side of the road, and the highway patrol are directing traffic over to the left to pass it. She notices the way Howard tenses. “Do you have a plan, or were you going to improvise?” she asks.

“It depends on whether Schiller’s church event is where he’s opening the gate, or merely where he’s feeding it from,” he admits.

“They’re separate.” She purses her lips. Can’t he see that? Doesn’t he have the inner eye to observe the magic lighting up the horizon all around? Clearly not—and she doesn’t think he’s the type to go through life with eyes wide shut.

“Then it also depends on whether the Nazgûl are on the case. I figure I can shut down one or the other but not necessarily both, assuming they’re in separate places. If the Nazgûl can shut down the gate I can stop the sacrifices, or vice versa. Or—”

“You are not asking me to take one of them. Why is that?”

She keeps her eyes on the road ahead, but her fingers tighten on the wheel. Howard might notice and think she’s tense because of the snow, but he’d be wrong. Clearly Lockhart didn’t brief him fully: it’s almost as if he thinks
he’s
in charge here.

Howard is silent for a few seconds. Then: “I don’t think it’s fair to ask civilian contractors to do something that could get them killed in the line of duty.”

Civilian Contractors?
Lockhart definitely left him in the dark, then, or maybe that part of her dossier was above Howard’s clearance level. But Persephone finds another aspect of Howard’s reply more interesting than his misconceptions about her and Johnny. “What has
fairness
got to do with it?”

Howard looks at her. She keeps her eyes on the road, but can half-feel his curiosity burning into the side of her face. “We hired you for a hands-off reconnaissance mission, not a suicide op. As of the moment Lockhart told me the operation was scrubbed, you were off the hook. You’re not part of the Laundry. You don’t
want
to be part of the organization. So you’ve done your bit; game’s over, you can go home and collect your pay packet with a clear conscience and a job well…okay, a job that
would
have been well done if the snark wasn’t a boojum after all.” He clears his throat. “I, on the other hand, swore a binding oath to defend the realm against certain threats, of which this is clearly one. Schiller made it my business when he stuck his nose into our tent back in London. Now, my job doesn’t stop until it’s over. If I was a complete bastard like some of my managers, I’d be looking for a way to blackmail you into giving your all for Blighty. But I tend to believe that the difference between
us
and
them
is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience. So once we’ve confirmed the target and gotten the word out, I want you to—”

Persephone can’t contain her laughter anymore: she starts to giggle. “Oh dear. Is
that
what you think?”

“Uh?”

“You listen to me. I am not going to leave this job half-done, and I am certain Johnny will say exactly the same when you ask him. You are not the only person here with a reason to put Schiller out of business.”

Howard hunkers down in his chair. “Oh,” he says quietly. “Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.”

“Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”

They drive on in silence for another ten minutes before Persephone feels calm enough to try to explain.

“The Laundry, Mr. Howard. It’s not noted for enabling high achievers, is it?”

“What?” He looks puzzled. “What, you mean—”

“It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.” She pauses to maneuver around a nose-to-tail queue of trucks that are making bad time on an uphill stretch, slowing as she sees red-and-blue lights on the shoulder ahead. “Wizards and visionaries are all very good but you cannot count on them for legwork and form-filling. Which is why there is tail-chasing and make-work and so many committee meetings and reports to read and checklists to fill out, to keep the low achievers preoccupied.

“Now, I suspect Gerald Lockhart didn’t brief you on certain…aspects of his department. Like its relationship with what is sometimes jokingly called Mahogany Row. And it’s not my place to brief you for him, but you appear to be working on the assumption that the tail wags the dog, not vice versa. So let me put it to you that there’s more to the occult intelligence world than institutional bureaucracy. Sometimes a bureaucracy grinds up against a problem that requires a mad genius instead of an office full of patient researchers. And indeed, the mad genii predate the bureaucracy. The Laundry is like an oyster nursing an irritating grain of sand within layers of bureaucratic mother-of-pearl.”

The snow is falling in ever-heavier sheets, obscuring the roadside signage and turning the slopes to either side of the freeway into blank white planes. “Sometimes they try to nurture the talent within the organization. You usually work for Dr. Angleton, don’t you? Yes, I suspect you’re one of
them
. The specialists who come up through the ranks. And then there are the external assets. Lockhart deals with those. Because sometimes the bureaucracy needs people who can do things that bureaucrats are not allowed to do, people who can work outside the law or who have unique skills. The organization needs to scratch its own back.”

She thumps the steering wheel hub hard. Howard jerks upright. “What?”

“I am not outside your
agency
, Mr. Howard, I am outside your
organization chart
. And I’m outside it because I am
more useful
on the outside. Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone. If I was embedded within the organization I would spend most of my time in committee meetings, writing reports, and arguing with imbeciles. I would be far less efficient under such constraints, and I am not a patient woman.”

The idiots in Rome, endlessly bickering over who had killed her parents, had tried her patience sorely. And the patronizing men at the Ministry with their
no job for a little girl
. The British organization, at least, had a more pragmatic approach—one reflecting its antique collegiate origins, all the way back to Sir Francis Walsingham and John Dee; never mind its wartime expansion into a special operations team, willing to take anyone whether or not they had been to the right school or university. Buried somewhere in the lard-belly of committee agendas and office politics is a steel spine, and the arrangement they offered her has proven to be very satisfactory.

“The Laundry is stranger and older than you probably realize,” she says quietly. “And the core, the informal group the bureaucrats call Mahogany Row, goes back even further. For hundreds of years they existed, a select band of practitioners of the dark sciences, solitary by nature, funded out of the House of Lords’ black budget.” Howard’s jaw flaps, silently; it’s always amusing to watch their reaction when they learn the truth. “Mahogany Row, the bureaucrats call it. They don’t know the half of it. The larger organization, built from the guts of SOE, was created purely to support the wizards of the invisible college; these days, the civil servants think they’re the real thing. But only because the occupants of those empty offices choose not to disabuse them of such a useful misconception.

“I believe Gerald Lockhart may have misled you about our working relationship, Mr. Howard. Perhaps he implied that Johnny and I are contractors who work for the agency. A little white lie that lends us a bit more flexibility than we’d have if we spent all our hours filling in time sheets and attending meetings. That sort of stuff is Gerald’s job—dealing with the bureaucracy so that we don’t have to. Us? We go places, break plots, and kill demons.”