The Apocalypse Codex (9 page)

That’s easy: “He didn’t.”

“Good.” Lockhart’s sudden smile is feral. “And what does that tell you? Feel free to speculate.”

“Oh?”
Now
I glance round, just in case a couple of blue suits from Operational Oversight have sneaked in behind me. “Well…Externalities is a really suggestive name for a small subdepartment, isn’t it? Utterly ambiguous—meaningless, really. There’s a box on the org chart under Facilities, and a couple of dotted lines leading to Ways and Means and Human Resources, and that’s
it
. Small staff, boringly mundane subdivision of the paperclip police. Nobody would ever look twice at it, except…”

“Yes?”

I take a deep breath. “You’re borrowing
Angleton’s
assistant. I think that says it all, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t get above yourself, Mr. Howard.” His smug expression belies his tone. “Just so that you know where you stand, everything I am about to tell you about this particular asset is classified BASHFUL INCENDIARY. Dr. Angleton is on the approved list, and—now—so are you. Your line manager (that would be Mr. Hinchliffe this month, would it not?) is not so cleared. Neither are your barber, your wife, or your pet cat, and I’d appreciate your cooperation in not spreading the magic circle. Under pain of your oath of office.”

I nod, jerkily. This is some heavy shit he’s drawing down. The oath of office here in the Laundry is rather draconian: forfeiting your eternal soul is only the beginning. “Uh. You asked for me for a reason. Can I ask why?”

“Hmm. I did
not
ask for you. You were
recommended
, and after due discussion it was agreed that you were eminently qualified for, and in need of the management experience that you can gain in, this posting.”

Management experience?
I feel an oh-shit moment coming on. “Um. Question mark?”

“Here in Externalities, we monitor organizational assets that are largely outside the usual lines of control—beyond regular management.” Lockhart smiles blandly.

“Paperclips? Attached to interdepartmental memos?” That’s improbable enough on the face of it. Most intelligence agencies are fanatical about locking down the hardware, banning phones and USB sticks and iPods from the premises. The Laundry takes a different approach, and focuses on securing the people, not the property—although sometimes this leads to, shall we say,
misunderstandings
in our dealings with other agencies.

“Paperclips, other assets.” Lockhart waves dismissively. “People on external assignment, for example. We provide support for senior executives on request. And it goes both ways. We also keep track of external contractors.”

“External
what
?” I stumble into disbelieving silence. External contractors? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Not here, not in an agency that promiscuously hires anyone and everyone who stumbles across the truth—makes them a job offer they can’t refuse, inducts them under the authority of an appallingly strong geas, and keeps them busy chasing paper until it’s time to retire. “But we don’t employ external contractors! Do we?”

“No, we don’t. Not as such.” His expression is so arch you could hang a suspension bridge from it. “Tell me, Mr. Howard, have you eaten recently?”

“No—”

“Then you’ll have no objection to accompanying me to lunch at a restaurant, will you? The organization’s paying.”

I boggle. “Isn’t that against accounting regs or something?”

“Not when I’m briefing a pair of contractors, Mr. Howard. Your job is to sit tight, ears wide, and
listen
. When we get back here afterwards there will be an exam. If you pass,
then
I shall explain what I want you to do for the next couple of weeks.”

“And if I don’t pass?”

“Then you go back to Dr. Angleton with a recommendation for some more training courses. And I shall have to do the job myself.” His cheek twitches at the prospect. I am beginning to get a handle on the code. That is an
unhappy
twitch: the caterpillar has indigestion. “However, that would not be an ideal outcome, because the job in question appears to be well-matched to your strengths.”

Damn him, he’s clearly been taking lessons from Angleton on best practice for baiting the Bob-hook. “Okay, I’ll bite. Lunch with a contractor, then an exam. Where do I start?”

“Right here.” And Lockhart folds back his black cloth, picks up a slim dossier headlined BASHFUL INCENDIARY, and watches vigilantly while I read it.

AFTER AN HOUR’S READING, MY HEAD IS SPINNING. MIDWAY
through the dossier, Lockhart—evidently satisfied by my absorption—tiptoes out of the office for a quick fag or something. I hear the door lock click behind him. Luckily I don’t need a toilet break. The file is quite slim, but the contents—or rather, their implications—are explosive.

Here’s the rub. The Laundry runs on three inviolate rules:

1) We make a point of recruiting—conscripting, really—everyone who learns the truth. That’s how I ended up here. We have a place for everyone (and make sure everyone knows their place).

2) It is a corollary of the preceding rule that we never employ external contractors. There are no independents.

3) Finally, and most importantly, the security services—of which we are one—do not snoop on Number Ten.

But
all
of these rules come with a sanity clause.

Take the first rule. It’s how everyone I know (Angleton excepted) came to work for the Laundry. We stumbled across something ghastly that we couldn’t handle, and before it could apply the Tabasco sauce and find us crunchy but good with fries the Laundry came and rescued us, then made us a job offer we weren’t allowed to refuse.

In my case, I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton with an unfortunate experimental rendering algorithm. (For my sins, they stuck me in IT Support for three years; on the flip side, I didn’t die.)

The B-team players we hire so we can keep an eye on them and protect them from the consequences of their own actions. The A-team players end up doing the protecting—both for the second-raters and for the Crown—defending the realm against things with too many tentacles and eye-stalks.

As for the second rule: if we employ everyone in the field, so to speak, then it follows that there are no external contractors. Anyway, external contractors would be a security risk. So even if there
were
external contractors, we couldn’t put them on the payroll without them taking the oath of allegiance, going the whole nine yards, etcetera. At which point, they wouldn’t be external.

As for the third rule…I’m guessing that’s where I come in. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself at this point.

HALF AN HOUR LATER LOCKHART COMES BACK AND REMOVES
the dossier from my nerveless fingers: “Are you coming?”

“Uh? Lunch? Sure.” I struggle to my feet. “I’ll just get my coat.”

He picks up the dossier, adds it to another that he’s carrying—I spot the subject JOHNNY PRINCE on the cover before I force myself to stop—and turns to stash them in his large and exceedingly secure-looking office safe. I make myself scarce.

We meet downstairs, just outside the empty department store window. Lockhart flags down a passing taxi. We ride in silence: fifteen or twenty minutes to Wardour Street, in the heart of London’s Chinatown. Pocketing a receipt, Lockhart leads me through the crowd of shoppers to a surprisingly familiar destination, if only because it’s infamous: the Wong Kei. “We’re meeting
here
?” I ask.

“Where better?” Lockhart says ironically as he leads me inside. It’s lunchtime and deafeningly loud inside the landmark restaurant. I’m expecting us to end up queuing, but no: as if by magic Lockhart flags down a waiter, mutters something, and we’re whisked through a
Staff Only
door, into a cramped lift that squeals and grinds its way up to the third floor, then along a narrow passageway to a private dining room. He pauses before we enter. “The budget will only stretch so far.” But my reading of his mustache is getting better, and right now it spells:
caterpillar is hungry for Cantonese
.

The room is cramped, illuminated by flickering fluorescent tubes and a tiny window outside which throbs a bank of kitchen extractor fans. But the table is already laid out with chairs for four and a pot of jasmine tea on the lazy Susan. “Remember what I said,” Lockhart warns me, “keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Within reason. Understood?”

I nod, and mime a zipper. I’d normally put up more of a fight, but after reading the BASHFUL INCENDIARY file I find myself curiously uninterested in making a target of myself: she might turn me into a toad or something.

A minute later—I’ve just filled both our cups with steaming hot tea—the door opens again. Lockhart stands, and I follow suit. “Good afternoon, Ms. Hazard.” The caterpillar is delighted. “Ah, and the estimable Mr. McTavish! How are you today?”

Handshakes and smiles all round. I take stock, then succumb to a brisk flashback: a disturbing sense that I’ve met these people before.

McTavish is easy to pigeonhole, hence doubly dangerous: in jeans and a hooded top he looks like a brickie, except I know what the sidelong flat stare and the ridges on the sides of his hands mean. He reminds me of Scary Spice, one of Alan Barnes’s little helpers—specialty: ferreting down rabbitholes full of blood-drenched cultists and undead horrors. The resemblance isn’t perfect, but I’ve met NCOs in special forces before and he’s got that smell. Although there is a slight
something else
about him as well: he punches above the weight.

She
, however—

“Charmed to meet you,” she says, and smiles, impish and vampish simultaneously. “I have heard so much about you, Mr. Howard! May I call you Bob?”

“I’m Bob to my friends,” I drone on autopilot as my brain freezes in the headlights. Stunning beauty in a minidress over black leggings, studiously casual yet somehow managing to send a bolt of electricity straight down my spine and drop my IQ by about fifty points on the spot…
Yes, I’ve seen her like before.
“That’s a nice glamour. Class two?”

Her smile freezes for an instant. “Class three, actually.” Then she lets it slip slightly and the starry soft-focus dissolves, and I’m merely shaking hands with a strikingly pretty dark-haired woman of indeterminate years—anything between twenty-five and forty—with Mediterranean looks and a dance instructor’s build, rather than a sorceress with a brain-burning beauty field set to Hollywood stun. “You have much experience of such things?”

“My wife doesn’t bother.” Is that a palpable hit? “But I’ve met them before, yes.”

Lockhart keeps a stony face throughout, but at this latter bit of banter he begins to show signs of irritation with me. “Bob, if you’d care to sit down, perhaps we could order some food?”

We sit down. I pointedly pay no attention to McTavish pointedly taking no slight at my pointed rejection of his mistress’s pointed—and unsubtle—attempt to beguile me. I’m somewhat disappointed. Do they think we’re amateurs or something?

“That was a very interesting service you sent us to last night,” Hazard tells Lockhart. She’s working on the English understatement thing, but her hands, expressive and mobile, give it away: she’s spinning exclamation marks in semaphore. “Absolutely fascinating.”

“Yes it was, wasn’t it?” Lockhart deadpans. He glances at McTavish. “You took a different angle, I assume?”

McTavish nods. “Penthouse and pavement.” His expression is oddly stony.

“Good—” Lockhart stops as the door opens. It’s one of the Wong Kei’s crack assault waiters, pad in hand. They’re famously rude; it’s all part of the service.

“You ready to order?” he barks.

“Certainly.” Lockhart is clearly a regular here. “I’ll start with the hot and sour soup…”

Two or three minutes later:

“Where was I?” Lockhart asks.

“You were grilling us about last night, as I recall,” says McTavish.

Hazard nods, eyes narrowing.

Lockhart glances at me briefly. It’s barely a flicker, but enough to warn me:
The game’s afoot
.

“Did you notice anything unusual about the, ah, performers?”

“What? Apart from the way they programmed the event to build the audience’s emotional investment in the key payload, then love-bombed them from fifty thousand feet with the warm floaty joy of Jesus?” Hazard props her chin on the back of her hand and pouts, sulky rather than sultry. “You should send Bob. He doesn’t like glamours. Do you, Bob?”

“Hey, it’s not you—it’s just that the last time someone put one on me I ended up buying an iPhone!” My protest falls on deaf ears.

“It’s not the glamour that interests me,” Lockhart says deliberately, “but the person it’s attached to.”

“You’re asking about Raymond Schiller, of the Golden Promise Ministries,” McTavish says lazily. “More like the Golden Fleece Ministries if you ask me, Duchess.”

“Mm, that tends to go with the territory.” Hazard is noncommittal.

“You didn’t see the average take in the collecting buckets at the back. Lot of people going short on luxuries this month, if you ask me.”

“The O2 Arena doesn’t rent for peanuts.”

“Unless it’s a charity loss-leader and they make up their margin on the food and entertainment franchises.” McTavish is a lot sharper than he looks. “Or someone with a glamour as good as Ray Schiller gets to the management committee.”

“Does he, ah, preach the prosperity gospel?” asks Lockhart.

“After a fashion.” McTavish’s lips are lemon-bitingly narrowed. “There are doctrinal shout-outs, dog-whistles the unchurched aren’t expected to notice. The prosperity gospel is in there, of course—it’s a Midwestern mega-church, after all. That’s what their appeal is all about. But there’s other stuff, too. It put me in mind of the church of my fathers, and not in a good way.”

“You didn’t say that last night.” Hazard sits up. The door opens as a pair of waiters appear, bearing trays laden with soup and starters. She continues after they leave, addressing Lockhart: “It was a very non-specific love-bombing, but it was a very public evening. I thought it was a recruiting drive for foot soldiers rather than a second-level indoctrination aimed at officers. Very skillful, though.”