Authors: Charles Stross
• • •
SO MHARI WANTS A DATE; I’LL GIVE HER A DATE. SHE’S
dressed, if not to the nines, then at least to the sevens or eights. Luckily I keep my emergency meeting kit hanging in its carrier on the inside of my office door. It’s the work of a couple of minutes to swap jeans and trainers for a not entirely unfashionable suit (Mo made sure of that) and respectable shoes: I don’t bother with a tie, though. No need to go overboard. Especially as this isn’t a
date
date: more like a sorry-I-haven’t-fucked-with-your-head-in-ten-years, how-about-we-try-again date.
I get downstairs just in time. Ten seconds later Mhari arrives from the opposite direction. She pauses and looks approvingly at me: “Oh my, that’s very grown-up! You’ve been working on your Clark Kent act, haven’t you?”
I can’t keep from rising to the bait. “It’s a uniform, Mhari. I sometimes have to go places where it’s useful to blend in.” Then I hold the door open for her. “Where do you have in mind?”
“Somewhere”—she takes my arm, surprising me—“where I wasn’t going to take you thirty seconds ago. Because, doormen.”
Which is why we end up in the Gordon Ramsay restaurant in the lobby of a dauntingly expensive (and famous) hotel.
Mhari seems to have spent the past decade acquiring wallet-humpingly expensive tastes, and I have no idea how I’m going to justify the particular credit card bill to Mo, but the surroundings are striking, the food and wine are memorable, and I’m sitting at the other side of a starched linen tablecloth from my own personal femme fatale, exchanging gossip about times gone by. And we get along fine: we always liked each other, if you can ignore the screaming tantrums, the venomous sulking, and the outbreaks of boot-throwing followed by startling eruptions of hot monkey-sex in lieu of actually working out what was wrong with our relationship.
“So that’s me,” she says over the
amuse-bouche
. “Dedicated corporate foot soldier, married to the job.” She shrugs, smiles, eyes twinkling. “Except once you’re in the . . . our organization, you never leave, do you? Not really. Hence the business with HR and your unfortunate misapprehension.”
“Yes.” It’s my turn to smile. We could play smile ping-pong all evening, table tennis diplomacy, and not get anywhere. “And your new trick. Tricks. Tell me, did someone in the organization put you up to it, or was it an accident?”
“That”—she raises an incredibly over-engineered canapé to her crimson-glossed lips—“would be telling.”
Crunch.
Some delicate chewing ensues as she watches me speculatively. “Mm. Tell you what. How about. We trade?”
“What?”
“Question for question, Bob.” The smile is back. Wicked or impish? I can’t tell: it’s in some kind of superposition of states, Schrödinger’s wildcat.
“Work or play?”
“That’s a
question
. Tell you what, I’ll answer yours first. Then I’ll ask you one. How about it?”
I can tell she’s trying to play some kind of head game on me, but I have an edgy feeling that I need her information . . . and besides, she hasn’t made me promise to tell the truth, has she? Mhari remembers me from over a decade ago. I have grown old and cynical and devious in her absence.
Let’s see where this leads,
I decide. “All right, within limits: I can’t discuss confidential or secret material.”
“I can live with that. Okay, answer to your first question: I don’t know.” She holds up a finger. “There are back channels, Bob. Nobody came up to me and said, ‘the Laundry wants you to get your programmers to have a look at this area.’ In fact, nobody from the Laundry has made overt, official contact with me in
years
. On the other hand, the area of group theory Alex was focussing on, and the multidimensional visualizer Evan was tweaking . . . they didn’t come out of nowhere. And it would amount to gross negligence if someone in HR wasn’t keeping track of which inactive assets were working for which employers. If you wanted to steer us into going that way you could have done it with a nudge, by having someone on one of the trading desks raise a requirement for . . .” She trails off, looking at me.
“
I
didn’t do it!”
“I didn’t ask,” she says drily. “And that wasn’t a question. So to complete my answer, I am not aware that the Scrum was set up to deniably explore a dangerous area—but the fact that a former Laundry HR body just happened to be in an executive role in the team is one hell of a suggestive coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Mm-hm.” I nod. “So you think someone else in the bank may have been acting as a conduit? Who might it be?”
“That’s another question. My turn first!”
“Okay.” My buttocks tense. I can’t help it.
“Let’s see . . .” She raises her wine glass. “What have you been doing, career-wise, since I left?”
“I can’t discuss that.” I think for a moment, then add: “However, you already know that I was sent to drop in on you a few weeks ago. If you think about it, that should tell you something.”
“Oh.” A minute furrow appears between her eyebrows. “Well, then. If you can’t answer that . . . what’s your domestic life like? You said you were married. Who to?” She puts her wine glass down. “
Don’t
tell me to check your Facebook profile, Bob.”
I shrug. She’s got me bang to rights. (Like everyone in the organization above a certain level, my Facebook profile is maintained by the disinformation office.
Not
having an FB account is suspicious these days, but we can’t afford to risk folks maintaining their own—the potential for inadvertent leaks is horrible, especially on a social network designed to promote self-disclosure.) “I’ve been married for eight years. She works for the Laundry, too, and I can’t tell you what she does. No kids, as I said before.” I shrug again. “We live in a safe house, we’re both on call, and we’re boringly vanilla. Perfect little organization homebodies, you could say.”
The furrow between her eyebrows deepens. “Really?”
Really?
No, not really. Things
aren’t
perfect. We’re clinging on to the precipice-edge of normality by our fingernails, with rocks and small boulders bouncing off our backs. Sometimes we argue, but I’m damned if I’ll tell Mhari that. I smile. “Really.”
“Good for you,” she says under her breath. A waitress appears from nowhere and makes the soiled plates disappear; another waiter dances past and vanishes, while bowls of exquisite-smelling soup appear in front of us. I blink, wondering if they’re using some kind of gate invocation—but no, it’s entirely sleight of hand. “This will be good,” she warns me. “Respect the food.”
We give the soup the silent appreciation it deserves. For myself, it also serves as cover for analysis. Mhari wants to know about my personal life? That’s suggestive, but there are multiple possible explanations. I wait until we’re most of the way through the course, then clear my throat. “Ready for another question?” I ask. She nods. “Okay, my question is the same as your last one. Married, divorced, single, kids, and so on. How about it?”
She puts her soup spoon down. “As subtle as ever.” She manages a wry smile. “Married for three years. Divorced. Had boyfriends since then. Currently single.”
My ward stings me, hard, just above my solar plexus. “Oof.”
“What?”
I close my eyes. “Mhari.”
“Yes—”
“Lying to me is not a good idea.” I open my eyes and she flinches. It’s a brief reflexive motion, rapidly controlled, but her pupils dilate. “‘Currently single’ isn’t the whole story, is it?”
“What—” She breaks eye contact, looks away with an expression of distaste. “Dammit, Bob. Are you clear on the concept of plausible deniability?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s not important. I don’t honestly need to know if you don’t want to talk—”
“Oh, I’ll tell.” She rolls the stem of her wine glass between forefinger and thumb. “He’s a banking executive and he’s married. It’s a status thing: trophy wife, two kids, famous in-laws, officially all stable and happy. So we’ve been having a fling on the side, but it’s strictly casual. He’s not going to divorce her in order to whisk me away to live happily ever after, and anyway, I’m not interested in life as Executive Wife 2.0.”
This
time my ward remains quiescent: she’s telling the unvarnished truth as she sees it, although there’s a slightly bitter edge to her voice. She looks at me speculatively: “I give it two weeks to run, plus or minus.
“Now. My next question. What are you hoping to get out of this conversation?”
I roll my eyes. “Who wants you dead?”
“No, it’s not your turn—”
“You misunderstand, that wasn’t a question. That was my answer.”
“What?” She looks perplexed.
“Mhari.” I look at my soup bowl. It’s empty. Time to lay my cards on the table: “Until forty years ago, the Laundry had an elaborate early warning program looking for v—for cases of a certain syndrome. It got de-funded. More recently,
everybody knows
that this syndrome doesn’t exist. If you challenge them on this point they will go to elaborate lengths to confabulate a rationalization for why this is so. More recently still,
your
Scrum shows up on
my
radar precisely as and when I go looking for you-know-what. And you know what else? You developed this condition about
one month
before I undertook the first systematic search for you-know-what by anyone in the Laundry in more than half a century.” I meet her gaze. “I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Someone with access to HR personnel records set you up. I suspect they anticipated that our history would predispose me to shut you down with extreme prejudice.”
Her pupils dilate. “You couldn’t do that—”
Something is pressing on my mind, like a warm, damp pillow. I shove back, hard, and she squeaks in surprise. “Mhari. The Bob you knew is—” I was about to say
dead
, but that’s over-dramatizing things a little, and in any case, I dodged on a technicality. “I’m not the same. Put it this way. If you were in OpExec, would you send the Bob you used to know to look into a nest of vampires?”
She must already have guessed, but she’s pinching the edge of the table with each hand. Gripping it, actually, as if she’s afraid of being blown away. Her eyes are wide: Did I push back too hard? “What
are
you?”
“I’m the person who’s trying to
save your life
, because right now you’re treading water in the dark and there’s something very nasty circling underneath. Tell me, do you know what happens to the people you feed on afterwards?”
“The—what do you mean?”
I close my eyes again. “You don’t know?”
“Know
what
? Bob, you aren’t making any sense!”
Waiters appear, disappear: our soup bowls vanish, replaced by artistic compositions in salmon. “I think someone decided to run a very dangerous experiment,” I tell her. “With total deniability. Set it up, then shut it down again, with nobody any the wiser. Only someone else, a rival, decided to hijack the project and that is why you’re still alive and we’re sitting here happily having dinner as I put the pieces together.” I pick up my fork. “You weren’t meant to live this long, and now you’re a problem for them.”
“Who
are
they?”
“I don’t
know
.” It’s my turn to be frustrated. “Whoever caused the Scrum to be set up. Not necessarily the person in the organization who knows about V syndrome and arranged for you to be part of it as their unwitting catspaw. Presumably they’re both, ah, people like you, only older. Ancients. But they’re going to have to shut you down, permanently, and soon.”
“Why?”
I’ve lost track of our little Q and A game. It doesn’t matter anymore: I push a morsel of salmon onto my fork and raise it. “Because every time you drink, you set up a sympathetic link between the V-parasites and a new victim, on whose brain the parasites then feed until the victim dies. Looks a lot like Krantzberg syndrome, or Mad Cow Disease,” I add in response to her horrified expression. “And the more vampires who hit on one donor, the faster it progresses.” I focus on the once-living thing on the end of my fork. “Just by feeding, you infect people. And I’ve got a suspicion that if you
don’t
feed the V-parasites, if you try to fast, they’ll eat you instead.”
Mhari pushes back her chair, stands, and marches towards the lobby of the restaurant. Her expression is set, her face pale, but she’s left her handbag. Halfway to the front desk she breaks into a trot and heads towards the discreet archway leading to the toilets. I can feel the waves of nausea coming off her from halfway across the restaurant.
Yes, she’s hungry.
I wonder if she’s been trying to starve the parasite? This could turn ugly, very ugly.
I spend the next five minutes eating slowly, trying to work out what to say and do next, all the while desperately trying not to admit that she’s my most important ex-significant other—before the woman I’m married to—and I’ve just told her that she’s contracted a fatal condition where the cure may be worse than the disease.
I feel like shit.
• • •
AFTERWARDS, THE ASSASSIN FINDS IT REMARKABLY EASY TO
tidy up the scene. She returns the handcuffs to her evening clutch; the condom goes into a baggie before it joins them.
A typical human body sheds perhaps five million skin particles per day. The woman who is not called Marianne has been in Evan’s company for only an hour, in gloves and tights and with lip gloss and sealer over freshly exfoliated facial skin. It will take painstaking forensic work to recover any DNA traces from his body, and just to make it all the harder, she retrieves a small baggie of gray powder from her clutch and squirts the contents across the sofa. It’s dust hoovered from the crevices of a booth in a night club, dust containing hundreds of thousands of fragments of skin from sweaty excited dancers.
Before she leaves, she pushes and shoves the sofa until Evan’s paralyzed body is positioned in front of the living room window. Then she touches the button to withdraw the curtains. She turns and leaves, exits the building, and gets into the car that has been parked across the street from Evan’s apartment since before he left the office. She walks with a spring in her step, tingling and happy from the mingled contact high of sex and death.