Authors: Charles Stross
Eventually it turns nine o’clock, and people are yawning. “Let’s call it a day,” I suggest, and nobody—not even Angleton—demurs.
I walk out into the corridor and, a few seconds later, Mhari follows me. “What now?” she asks.
“Taxi.” I don’t like the expense (London taxis are not cheap) but there are two of us, and I don’t like the exposure of walking.
“Okay,” she says. “Do you have a spare key? What about dinner?”
“Spare key’s at home. I was thinking of Chinese takeaway . . .”
She rolls her eyes. “Oh you. You haven’t changed a bit, have you?”
We hail a taxi, and after a brief ride (and a cabbie-administered walletectomy) I lead Mhari up the garden path, all two wheelie-bin-lined meters of it. “Watch out for the wards,” I tell her as I apply key to lock.
“You don’t have to warn me. Brr! What did you do, bury an electrical substation under the front step?”
The door opens. “Come on in.” I step inside and turn on the hall lights. “We had a problem with unwelcome visitors a couple of years ago and they really beefed up the security afterwards.” I don’t tell her about the additional precautions we’re taking tonight: the basilisk camera in my left jacket pocket, or the Glock 17 loaded with banishment rounds in a quick-draw holster in my right. Mhari might be back in HR but I still don’t think she’s got the full picture about what I actually do these days.
“What caused the problem? Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
“Nah, they were easy enough to get rid of: I just made an appointment to discuss the Bible later, then invited Pete round. We’ve been blacklisted ever since. It was the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh.” I rub my right upper arm instinctively. Everything is better with cannibalism and necromancy.
She closes the front door and I relax as the defensive ward reactivates itself. For a moment we had a break in the secure perimeter. But now . . . we’re okay. I begin to shrug out of my overloaded jacket, planning to hang it in the hall, as Mhari squeezes past in the direction of the kitchen.
“Wrrraow?”
“Waugh!” Mhari almost levitates out of her Louboutins. “You didn’t say you had a cat!”
I look round. The cat is lurking on the staircase that runs up one side of the hall, roughly at eye level, staring out at her from between the baluster poles with an expression of concentrated, black-eyed malevolence. One paw flops between the rails, over the side of the stairs. “Er. I have a cat. Mhari, meet Spooky. Spooky—ah, what the hell. You don’t have a problem with cats, do you?”
“No.” She eyes Spooky warily from just out of paw’s reach. I can guess what happened. Darkened hall, dark brown carpet, black-furred ambush hunter. “Did she go for you?”
“She nearly gave me a nasal piercing!” Spooky, detecting that she is the subject of attention, rolls on her back and squirms, purring and exposing her rib cage like a hairy mantrap. Mhari glares, then walks through into the kitchen, leaving the cat to enjoy her control of the commanding heights. “Huh. This doesn’t say ‘Bob’ to me.”
“That’s because it says ‘Bob and Mo,’” I point out. “Tea and coffee’s in that cupboard, milk’s in the fridge, bread bin’s over there, recycling’s under that worktop by the back door.” She hasn’t put her bag down yet. And now that I’m paying attention, I realize that all she’s got is what she’s wearing and what’s in her handbag. Nobody was planning a sleepover when they woke up this morning. “Hmm. We’ve got some spare toiletries and a dressing gown you can use, and if you give me a list of necessities I can pick them up tomorrow and drop them round before plan beta kicks off. But first I need to check the spare bed’s made up and the blackout curtains are adequate. Let me show you around . . .”
“If you don’t mind.” She smiles, uncharacteristically diffident. “I’ll try not to be any trouble.”
• • •
WHAT AROUSES OSCAR IS THE DEGREE TO WHICH HIS KIDNAPPER
reminds him of a younger version of his wife, Pippa. They’re both skinny blonde chicks with that brittle finishing-school lacquer, cheekbones sharp enough to hone knives on, firm, rounded breasts just about bursting out of the top of her cocktail dress, long, stockinged legs that go on forever, arms sheathed in black satin gloves. She has natural-blonde hair up in a ponytail, bee-stung lips, glistening like . . . don’t think about it. Pippa’s gone slightly to seed in the past few years, rosy-cheeked from the vino, saggy skin and stretch marks from dropping the crotch-fruit, skin showing the first wrinkles from over-exposure to sea and sun. But this girl could be Pippa’s mad-eyed party-animal jailbait younger sibling, from back in the day. Except that Pippa’s an only child.
Being kidnapped by someone who looks like your wife’s demented younger sister in a party frock is a very strange experience, but he’s enjoying it so far. Yes, she’s got a gun and she’s obviously unstable. But since he became a PHANG his senses have become acute. He can smell waves of lust rising off her like steam: if there isn’t a puddle in her panties with his name on it, his name isn’t Oscar Menendez. And if that minx Mhari isn’t putting out for him right now, beggars can’t be choosers, can they? (Even if they’re really millionaires, soon to be billionaires.)
It’s all a bit of a joke, really . . .
It had started at eight o’clock, when his cellphone rang. It was the car alarm monitoring service. “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but did you know your car alarm is going off? According to out tracking system it’s not moving, but someone’s opened the door.”
“Which car?” he asked.
“It’s the, ah, the Mercedes Vito, sir.” The getaway van. He blinked, taking a moment to remember, relieved that it wasn’t the Porsche. “It’s still in the car park at—”
“I’ll sort it out,” he said, mildly irritated. “That’s a secure pound under my office; it’s probably a false alarm. Can you call me again if it moves? It’ll take me a while to get there and reset the alarm.” Hanging up, he took the elevator down to the hotel lobby and hailed a cab to the bank. Going to his long-lost place of work for the first time in what felt like years (even though it was only a few weeks) was alienating. It felt even weirder to be making the trip in home-casual rather than office uniform. Like a dream, complete with the same sense of something-not-quite-right. Not for the first time he found himself wondering if buying the van hadn’t been a mistake right from the start.
The van was an indulgence; also, an obligation; and finally, a precaution. He’d bought it as soon as he began to grasp the scope of the opportunity that brilliant fool Alex had presented him with, but before Mhari had told him about the Laundry. It wasn’t his true getaway option, but it was a good-enough decoy to convince the rest of the Scrum that he was planning to take them with him, and it also served a secondary function. His
real
getaway option lived in an anonymous wallet in a bottom drawer in his second guest bedroom at home: a genuine Canadian passport with genuine biometrics matching him, in a name nobody he worked or lived with knew about. Along with the matching birth certificate and the diamond Visa and Mastercard—both genuine—the wallet’s contents had cost him ten times as much as the van, and would carry one tenth as many passengers to safety. But the van would do in an emergency, if the bug-out wallet was compromised by an Interpol Red Alert: Oscar had not got where he was today by skimping on preparations.
The Scrum were also blissfully unaware of the special fixtures and fittings he’d installed in the Mystery Machine to support its secondary function. The illegal pistol hidden behind the plastic trim on the front passenger-side door. The false number plates and the phlebotomy kit and the body bag folded under the floor of the rear compartment. It behooved Oscar to keep an eye on the van, hence the expensive anti-theft tracking system.
Oscar had taken the lift down from the lobby to the underground car park, expecting to find nothing much. Most likely an inconsiderate ass who’d exceeded his recommended daily dose of intra-nasally delivered Vitamin C had backed his Chelsea Tractor into the front bumper before screeching off home. Nevertheless, he inspected the van from a distance, then close-up, before approaching: everything seemed to be in order. But as he walked around the driver’s side he noticed an anomaly. The door lock button was raised.
Frowning, he opened the door.
“Hi!” said the woman in the passenger seat. “You must be Oscar. Please don’t move.”
Oscar had blinked. One moment she wasn’t there; the next, he opened the door and she was beaming at him over the barrel of his own—
No, it wasn’t his pistol. His was an ancient, battered, and very illegal revolver: the best he’d been able to get, given his shortage of low-life acquaintances. This was an automatic, dull and black, with a suppressor protruding from the barrel, like something out of a James Bond movie. Her black opera gloves made it look like a bizarre extension of her arms.
“For your safety and comfort,” she said in a sing-song voice, “you should be aware that this gun can shoot
straight through
the side of this vehicle. Mm-hmm! Now I want you to open the rear passenger door and climb in, then sit down in the right-hand seat and fasten your seat belt. It’s going to be a fun ride!”
Bemused, Oscar did as he was told. Then, because he had to try: “Please point that gun somewhere else?” he asked, putting just a bit of mental push behind the words.
“I don’t think so.” She was still smiling, a fey, secretive expression as if it was a great big joke they shared. “Doesn’t work on me, lover-boy. Is your seat belt tight?”
Oscar swallowed.
Is she a vampire?
he wondered. “What is this?”
“Put these on.” She produced a pair of handcuffs. “Then we’re going for a drive. A magical mystery tour! Isn’t that wild?”
The handcuffs featured a fake leopard-skin lining. Still bemused, Oscar clipped them around his right wrist.
“And the left, dear,” she said. He put his left wrist in the cuff, leaving it loose. Then something happens. A blur. He blinks and she’s standing next to him in the open doorway, gun out of reach and her left hand on his wrist, the cuffs closed and locked. They’re the modern kind, with a rigid steel bridge. The door slides shut and slam-locks, and he peers out through the dark-tinted glass as she walks forward and climbs into the driver’s seat. “No one outside can see anyone in here except the driver,” she says.
Oscar shakes his head, but the glamour she’s hit him with overpowers his skepticism. He’s sprouting an erection, as if being kidnapped at gunpoint and handcuffed in the back of his own engine of abduction is a turn-on. The knife-edge between sex and death is very sharp.
She slides the keys into the ignition—somehow she’s taken them from him—then starts the engine and carefully pulls out of the parking bay. As the van climbs the exit ramp, she starts to sing, in a passably good voice:
“I think we’re alone now . . .”
She drives for a long time, out into the back roads of Hertfordshire, until she finds a suitable place to park: the north gateway leading to a field, at the end of a lane half a mile from the nearest bus stop. Then she climbs into the back of the van and has her way with Oscar. He disappoints her by ejaculating almost immediately; she frowns in distaste. “Kiss-
kiss
!” she chides him as she breaks his neck. Then she rides him until she comes repeatedly, eyes squeezed shut, shuddering in triumphant dominion.
Afterwards she cleans up the crime scene as usual. The last thing she does is to turn Oscar’s paralyzed head to face the open passenger door. It’s facing east, and the sky is black and cloudless, sprinkled with stars. She kisses him on lips that still sense and move, trying breathlessly to form words even though he has no control over his lungs. Then she walks away towards the bus stop, leaving him paralyzed and alone to face the dawn.
She wonders what her new patron wants her to do next. She hasn’t had this much fun in years.
• • •
NOW PAY ATTENTION! WE HAVE A PLAN. AND THE PLAN IS SIMPLE ENOUGH:
Someone is stalking and killing our hemophagously inclined employees.
We believe there is an inside connection, and they know where the PHANGs live. (More speculatively: the inside connection may be a very old, very sneaky PHANG who doesn’t like the competition, or the attention they’re drawing, or who manipulated them into existence as an experiment and who has now decided they are surplus to requirements, or who has stolen them from some other very old, sneaky PHANG with some other scheme in mind . . .)
Obviously, we want to protect our people, hemophagous or otherwise. After all, if we can’t even protect our people, what does it say about our ability to meet our operational targets? (Also: if you ever want to see a self-kicking conga line, tell a security organization that for the past forty years someone has been manipulating its information flow from the inside.)
Anyway: we intend to place all but one of our PHANGs out of reach, then build an ambush for whoever or whatever goes after the only available target. Who will look like an easy kill because, normally, they would be. However, anyone who goes for Alex is going to have to come at him across a prepared killing ground guarded by me and an entire OCCULUS team, including a couple of “bricks” from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, and through a security cordon controlled by SO15, the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, who are there to ensure that the SRR and SAS heavies get to do their stuff without drawing undue attention.
That’s the theory—the easy part. The hard bit is how to go about exposing our tethered goat, without actually tipping off the adversary that it’s a trap. As my archival enquiries have almost certainly activated a tripwire, that’s going to be hard. As all the surviving PHANGs (except Oscar, who, as of my departure from the office, is still missing) are under cover or locked down, we’ve effectively served notice on our adversary that we know they’re out there. It’s hard to see how we could have avoided it, in view of their very public disposal of Evan and Sir David. So our exposure of the bellwether has to look like some kind of accident, and we have to present an easy enough target to tempt the killer out of hiding, but not such a juicy one that their suspicions are aroused.