The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  Churches. “You think Schiller’s people could have…”

  He frowns pensively. “The Metropolitan Police are an equal opportunities employer. As such they’re not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religious faith. So it’s not impossible.”

  Oh, this keeps on getting better and better. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  “Chin up, dear boy. We’ll get to the bottom of it.” The SA stands. “I’m going to go and find out if I can sign you out, or if I need one of Chris Womack’s people. Don’t give them a statement without a security-cleared solicitor present. And don’t assume that just because they’re in uniform they’re loyal to the same crown.”

  * * *

  While I’m talking to the SA about my spurious arrest, another meeting is happening—this one in Audit House, a Georgian town house in central London. Part of the Crown Estates, Audit House is used by the Laundry for high-level briefings and off-site administrative meetings that involve personnel from other agencies. Today’s session has been called by Morgan Hastings, Emma MacDougal’s grand-boss in charge of Human Resources. It’s ostensibly set up to be a brainstorming session about efficiency improvements and fixed-cost savings, but the subtext behind the invitation fills Mo with deep foreboding, which only continues to mount as she drinks coffee with the other participants.

  The group assembling in the morning room come from various departments within the agency, but they have in common long faces and overstressed dispositions. Everyone in Operations (and not a few in Oversight) are scrabbling to cover for colleagues queuing up before various boards of enquiry to testify as to their deeds a month ago. HR and Facilities are desperately trying to find a way to recover from the organization’s second headquarters move in a row being disrupted, and today’s meeting was called to discuss the agency’s response to a forthcoming funding review and other changes that fall somewhere on the continuum between unwelcome and critically damaging.

  Mo is finishing her coffee while keeping tabs on faces she knows when she senses a familiar presence behind her left shoulder. “I hate it when you do that,” she says, maintaining a thin layer of control—her cup only rattles on her saucer for a moment—as she turns. “So they roped you in, too?”

  “Sorry.” Her former operations officer shrugs nonchalantly, but Mo knows her well enough to spot her unease. “I’m here because somebody has to look out for my people, and I drew the short straw. Not to mention the, uh…” Mhari trails off, uncertain. Which in and of itself rattles Mo more than her silent arrival, because normally Mhari is admirably decisive.

  “The prisoners?” Mo waits.

  Mhari nods minutely. To someone who doesn’t know her well, she might merely look worried, but Mo recognizes something else in her expression: carefully controlled fear.

  “You’re afraid the rations won’t stretch.”

  Mhari nods again. “That too.” She takes Mo by the elbow, very lightly: “Do you know for sure what this is about?”

  It’s Mo’s turn to tense up. “It’s the inevitable. You know very well we’ve been overstaffed for decades.” She takes a deep breath, but Mhari gets her punch in first.

  “Yeah, but for my people it’s not about a final salary pension scheme,” she whispers vehemently, “it’s life or death! Mo, what are they going to do to us?”

  “I don’t know,” she replies, her voice hollow, “I really don’t know. They haven’t told the Auditors anything you haven’t already heard.”

  “Well…” Mo hears the implied expletive as clearly as if Mhari shouts it in her ear. Nobody’s happy to be here today, but the PHANGs have more grounds for anxiety than most. And that’s without considering the knock-on implications for the situation behind the fence on Dartmoor. Fear and loathing will be the order of the day when the bad news from this meeting trickles out to the organization at large. No stones will be left unturned, and in addition to the inevitable, it’s likely that some nasty wriggling things will be brought to light as a side effect.

  The doors to the former drawing room open and people file in, coffee cups still in hand. Rows of seats fill the room and there’s a desk at the front, with a projection screen and laptop. Mhari sits down beside Mo, on the other side from Vikram Choudhury. He turns and whispers in her direction: “Good luck.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  Mo settles back in her chair as Mr. Hastings walks to the front. “Can I have your attention please…?” The quiet conversational buzz gives way to unhappy anticipatory silence.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry to spring this on you like this, but Cabinet Office has prepared an order in council that came into effect this morning. As of today, Q-Division is dissolved. A new Cabinet Portfolio for Paranormal Activities is being established, and will take over responsibility for all activities previously under the agency’s aegis when it becomes active next Monday. You will return to your departments, return all classified materials to storage no later than five o’clock today, and inform any personnel working under your direction that they are being made redundant. HR is distributing out-processing packs and hard-copy paperwork to your offices right now; all IT logins are revoked as of ten minutes ago. Everyone is to leave in good order, take personal effects only, return all wards and inventory items to their designated secure storage area, and deposit their warrant cards at the front desk. Personnel will be paid through to the end of the current calendar month and there will be statutory redundancy pay and pension and social security contributions. In addition, HR are required to take onward contact details for all out-processed personnel on behalf of the new agency that will come into existence next Monday. The new agency will not continue our obligation under Article 4 to provide supervisory employment for all researchers who independently discover the key theorems. Are there any questions?”

  Mo sags in her chair for a moment, then sits up straight again. She feels breathless, as if gut-punched. Around her there’s a buzz, not of conversation but of shock and disbelief and denial. Mhari, to her left, is quietly swearing. To her right, Vikram is shaking his head: no, no. She looks around, but there’s no sign of the Senior Auditor anywhere. She raises her right hand.

  “Yes?” Mr. Hastings is looking at her.

  “What happens to operations in progress?” she demands, a sense of anger and injustice settling over her. “We’ve got people working in the field! Who’s going to take over the agency’s ongoing business processes? What about remote sites and facilities?” She doesn’t stoop to mentioning personnel living in subsidized key worker accommodation or relying on regular supplies of biohazardous material for their sustenance; everybody present can figure it out for themselves. “This is totally irresponsible!”

  Hastings frowns thunderously. “I don’t know,” he says, voice cracking with frustration. “This came down from the Cabinet Office last night. All I know is what I’ve been told, which is that SOE is being dissolved with immediate effect—”

  “Reckless!” someone at the back interrupts, and it’s as if a dam has burst: within seconds almost everyone—and they’re all senior enough to be able to keep a grip on their tongues—is trying to get their word in.

  “Please! Let me speak! Please!” Hastings is turning pink at the podium. For a moment Mo wonders if he’s about to have an aneurysm, but gradually the immediate hubbub subsides. “I’m in this with you,” he adds, and suddenly everyone stops talking. A pin could drop with the reverberation of a kettle drum. “The government, for better or worse, has decided to dissolve the agency with immediate effect and, to the best of my knowledge, no active replacement to hand. We, as the agency’s management, are tasked with shutting everything down in an orderly manner and turning out the lights. What happens next”—he looks at the upturned faces, an expression of something like desperation on his face—“let’s just hope they know what they’re doing,” he ends on a near-whisper.

  * * *

  It’s a quarter to one and I’m sitting in the break room of the underground cust
ody suite with an empty mug of coffee and the television for company, when a sense of dread steals over me, as if an entire colony of black cats just used my future grave as an outdoor toilet.

  I shuffle uncomfortably on the threadbare sofa. Cold sweat begins to prickle on my spine and my pulse is suddenly audible, a drumbeat in my ears. The rolling news has revolved back to today’s human interest story, something about a goat at a petting zoo adopting one of the feral parrots of Regent’s Park, but every nerve is shrieking at me that something is wrong and I need to get out of here now.

  Then the door opens. I look up. It’s Jo Sullivan. She doesn’t look happy. “Bob?” She beckons towards me.

  “Yeah?” I stand. “Has the duty solicitor—”

  She shushes me urgently. “Bob, something’s wrong.”

  “Wha—”

  She holds up the melted wreckage of a ziplock evidence baggie. Something that might have been my warrant card has gathered in one corner, and the whole thing is dripping wet. “I dunked it in the sink when it went up. Bob, what’s going on?” My expression must be sufficiently eloquent, because before I can put my mouth in gear she adds: “It just went up in flames like a broken cell phone battery. Right after I got word that I’m being called in by the chief super this afternoon. Something about a new desk assignment, new responsibilities.” She focuses on me like a kestrel that’s spotted a field mouse. “Do you know anything about this?”

  The skin-crawling sensation is back, extra intense. I extend a finger towards the baggie: “May I—shit.” It doesn’t feel like my warrant card; it feels dead. And I feel adrift. That’s what this is: it’s a lack of certainty, a sense of something missing, like I’m a homing pigeon in a Faraday cage who suddenly can’t sense which way points to magnetic north. “Didn’t Dr. Armstrong say he was sending the duty solicitor round? Like, about two hours ago?”

  “Bob. Listen to me.” Jo leans close and drops her voice. She’s putting on the trust-me-I’m-a-police-officer vibe, trying to take control of the situation, or maybe she’s afraid I’ll panic. “Can they revoke your warrant card?”

  Huh? “I d-don’t—” I stop speaking and force myself to take a breath. My hands are clammy with a near-panic reaction. Rudderless. Oh, this is bad, very bad indeed. “They wouldn’t do that,” I say, with every microgram of certainty I possess, realizing as I say it that it’s absolutely true. “Jo, you remember Dr. Angleton?” She nods. “You remember I was his understudy?” Another nod, slower this time. “These days I’m not his deputy anymore. They wouldn’t cut me loose any more than the Navy would ignore it if one of their Trident warheads went missing. B-but I-I-I-can’t feel it anymore.”

  It’s not like me to have a panic attack, not like me at all, but I’m not sure what’s going on. I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million bureaucratic org chart boxes suddenly became vacant. Or maybe like someone with admin rights tried to drunk-empty the Recycle folder across an entire storage area network without warning the users. A huge and reassuring weight at the back of my mind has vanished, taking with it a sense of certainty. I probe at it, like exploring the socket where a tooth has just been removed, and realize what it is. There’s still something there—I have more than one tooth, more than one binding geas—but my regular oath of office is missing.

  “I’m not bound anymore,” I tell her, with rising incomprehension. “Jo, have they sacked me?”

  “Don’t know,” she says tersely. “But you’re supposed to be in the secure lock-up next door and I’m not allowed to leave you here if you’re, if—” She swallows. Suddenly she looks a lot less raptorial. “Would you mind moving next door?” she asks, almost diffidently. “While we sort this out?”

  I look her in the eye, wondering if I can do this. I know Jo. She’s not a friend exactly, but I trust her and respect her judgment and I think she’s a very solid police officer, and normally I’d do as she says without asking questions. Well, more questions than usual. But something about this situation doesn’t strike me as normal, even for being arrested and held in supervillain nick. “I’d like to call the SA again,” I tell her.

  She glances sidelong at the door. “There’s no signal down here. Promise to go back in the box afterwards if I take you up to the yard?”

  Fuck me, I’m going to hell for this, and I don’t even believe in hell. “I promise. Scout’s honor, on my oath of office.”

  “Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She vanishes for a while, then reappears with another evidence baggie. Then she leads me to the vault door and thence to the elevator. The ride up to the concrete-walled yard up top seems to take forever. I stare at the scuffed metal walls despondently. If this is a mistake I can just go back, I rationalize. I don’t have to fuck over a not-a-friend-exactly in a career-ending way. But that sense of something missing won’t go away, and I know in my guts that I’m about to be a very bad boy.

  “Here.” She opens the baggie and passes me my phone. “You’ve got three minutes, then I’m going to have to take you back down to the cells again and I can’t promise I’ll let you out any time before your hearing.”

  “Jesus, Jo.” I take the iPhone and I touch the home button, and it doesn’t unlock. “Hang on.” I try a different finger. Enter PIN. “Hang on.” I use a long number, not just four digits, and it takes me a moment to get it right, then the phone unlocks. I fire up the OFCUT app and select Secure Voice Call, and my phone reboots to a pale glowing Apple logo. “What the fuck?”

  A progress bar begins to crawl across the screen. “Problem?” asks Jo.

  I shrug. “Phone’s on the fritz. Got to wait while it reboots.” She nods. Rebooting seems to take forever, but finally it’s done and with a sigh of relief I touch the home button, only to see a very unwelcome WELCOME logo. “Fuck. It just did a full factory reset on me!”

  “Then it’s not much use standing here, is it?” Jo points out. “I’ll call the SA and keep bugging him until he sends someone, but you can’t wait here—”

  “Sorry,” I say as I close my imagined mental fist on her mind, and the flicker of horror in her eyes before they roll up makes my stomach churn.

  I manage to catch her as she collapses so that she doesn’t crack her head, and I lay her out on the ground. She’s still breathing, and something inside my head is screaming and raging at me for baiting it to wakefulness, then not letting it eat its fill, but I don’t listen to my inner feeder. I think she’ll be okay. I hope she’ll be okay. If she isn’t okay … I don’t want to think about that. If I’d known I was going to be in this bind I’d have prepped a binding macro and a no-see-um or two, but that’s not the sort of thing you can do safely on the back of an envelope in a lock-up and you have to work with what you’ve got.

  We are not alone in the yard. There are steps up to a back door into the main station where a constable smoking a cigarette begins to turn towards us as she slumps. I wave to him urgently. “Inspector’s collapsed!” I yell. “Call a paramedic, I’ve got this!” I kneel beside Jo for a moment as he throws away his butt and scrambles inside, then I unhook her ID badge and lanyard and close my eyes. I can feel him dashing into the station, so after a count of three I follow him, but I zig where he zagged and the instant I turn the corner on the windowless corridor I drop back to a slow walk with my hands behind my back. I surreptitiously tug my sleeves down in case any cuff abrasions are visible, and I let my awareness spread out, feeling for thinkers to either side.

  If you ever have occasion to move unchallenged through a big construction site, your disguise needs to include certain totemic elements of the trade: a hard hat, hi-vis jacket, and a clipboard, for example. Anyone looking at you will assume you’re a surveyor or architect’s assistant—someone else with reason to be there but who marches to a different drumbeat.

  And if you ever need to escape from a police station, your best disguise is to look like a cop. Or, to be more specific, a detective: soberly suited, ID badge visible (but photo conc
ealed by your tie), and walking the policeman’s walk, watching everything, giving nothing away. It helps that I can feel the minds around me. I can’t read them, but I know which rooms are empty and which hold meetings; I know when someone’s going to come around the corner ahead of me or when the lift is going to open.

  It takes me about two minutes to work my way through the warren of offices to the front of the building, then out past the front desk unchallenged. The main road outside is busy as usual and there’s no sign of any alarm. By now they’ve probably found Jo and realized I’m nowhere to be found, and possibly they’ve worked out that there’s somebody missing from the enhanced security lock-up, in which case all hell is about to break loose … but I’m already on the pavement. I see a black cab with its hire sign illuminated and I stick my arm out instantly, and the driver pulls over to let me in.

  “Where to?” he asks.

  “Sloane Square.” I sit back and tighten my seat belt as he pulls back out into traffic and sets course, feeling another stab of guilt: I have no money and no intention of paying, or of leaving my driver in any immediate condition to tell the police what happened. But Sloane Square is within walking distance of Persephone’s house, and I really need to touch base with someone who can tell me what the fuck is going on today. If ’Seph tells me I’m off base, I suppose I’ll have to go back to Belgravia and hand myself in and face the music. (And in addition to whatever stupid charge got me huckled in the first place we can now add: assaulting a police officer, absconding from custody, theft, and another assault charge.)