The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  But I really don’t expect that to happen. Something has gone wrong with the oath of office, and having read the DELIRIUM brief, I’ve got a horrible feeling I know what it is.

  * * *

  The New Annex is in an uproar when Mo gets there.

  She takes the stairs to the fourth floor, to Mahogany Row, through knots and clusters of staff gathered in corridors and talking in hushed, vehement tones. Ordinary work has been cancelled; computer screens in the admin areas are dark. Security are everywhere, escorting weepy, angry, and variously emotional employees carrying cardboard boxes. She passes doors that are sealed shut with police evidence tape, others that glow with the inscribed radiance of activated security wards. She feels numb as she turns the corner, onto the carpet, then sees the SA’s office door standing open.

  “Doctor—” She gets as far as the threshold before she stops. It’s Dr. Armstrong’s office door, but it doesn’t open onto Dr. Armstrong’s office. There’s an empty room here, grimy curtainless windows staring like a dead man’s eyes at the building on the opposite side of the main road. The floor is worn lino, scuffed and battered and unsullied by furniture. The man himself is nowhere to be seen.

  Mo leans against the doorpost for a moment, overcome by a dizzying sense of disorientation and alienation. This can’t be happening. It takes an effort of will to pull herself together. The beehive, minutes after the queen has died. Something in her handbag is buzzing; it takes her a moment to realize that it’s her phone. She opens her bag, stares at the screen for a moment, then answers it, heart in mouth: it’s a regular voice call from the SA.

  “Dominique.” Dr. Armstrong’s voice is a lifeline.

  “Yes?” She realizes she’s clutching her phone in a death grip. “What’s happening? Did you hear—”

  “Yes, I already know. PLAN TITANIC is in effect. Your phone”—his voice sharpens—“do you have OFCUT or any other agency assets installed?”

  “Um, yes, I think so—”

  “Don’t activate it. I want you to…” He pauses for a moment, before continuing: “Where are you? Are you back at the New Annex?”

  “Yes, I’m at your office—did you know—”

  “I cleaned it out this morning. Let’s see … you have received instructions about winding up your tasking. I suggest you comply with them. However, first you should check your in-tray. You’ll find an interoffice envelope from me with some additional instructions. After you leave the building, meet me at the safe house in Docklands. Observe evasion protocol. Can you do that? Oh, and don’t try and get in touch with Bob.”

  “Bob? What, has something happened?”

  “I’ll explain this evening.” A note of urgency creeps into the SA’s voice. “Don’t try and call me back at this number. Check the instructions in your office. We’ll talk soon.”

  And with that, he hangs up.

  Mo, still shocky from the dismissal meeting, stumbles along the corridor to her own office door. The stenciled lettering on the name plate is so fresh that the paint is still nearly tacky. She strokes her finger across the ward on the door, then opens it. As the newest of the Auditors Mo has no people reporting to her, yet. Not having to tell anyone else that they’re out of a job is a small mercy, and she sits at her desk with her eyes closed for a few minutes, practicing her deep breathing, before she even bothers to check her in-tray.

  There is a thick envelope—almost a parcel—addressed and sealed with a spidery silver sigil, a ward drawn in the SA’s own hand. Mo opens it and tips the contents onto her desk, then stares at them. There is the expected letter, of course, handwritten for security. The writing appears, shimmering, a few millimeters above the paper when she touches it, existing in a dimension inaccessible to anyone who lacks the SA’s permission to read it. There’s a cheap plastic card wallet as well, and a box that looks to contain a cheap smartphone. Mo opens the card wallet and sees her own frozen face staring out of it, next to a familiar coat of arms, beneath a new and distinctly disturbing motto: CONTINUITY OPERATIONS. “So that’s how it’s going to be,” she mutters. She opens the phone box next, unsurprised to see that clever fingers have gotten there before her. It’s an Android device rather than her familiar iPhone, and there’s a Post-it note on the screen that says USE ME. She snorts quietly, amused, and fidgets for a moment until she’s found the power button. An unfamiliar logo lights up the screen, then is replaced by the Laundry’s coat of arms: someone has been busy installing custom ROMs. Mo sets it aside as it starts up, then turns to the SA’s letter and reads, the text scrolling across the paper and fading into the air as she assimilates it.

  Nothing in the letter is terribly unexpected. This is her new phone, encrypted and patched and provisioned with OFCUT; a list of GOD GAME INDIGO contacts are already in memory. She’s to secure it with a strong password and enter key contact addresses by hand, and must not pair it with her old phone or connect it to any agency desktop or use it for any agency business before she leaves the office for the last time. Her old phone may be a personal item but it’s compromised, and the next time she activates OFCUT it will be scrubbed clean and reset. (She swears horribly at this point. Her old phone is also her contact number for her mother and sister, not to mention her husband.) The warrant card … again: it is not to be used until she has left the office for the last time. Indeed, it won’t work at all until she has been sworn into the chain of command of Continuity Operations.

  Badge, phone, secret agent decoder ring … Mo slides them into her handbag, then reads the last paragraph of the SA’s letter:

  Continuity Operations is most secret. You should presume that CO is under active attack at all times and conduct yourself accordingly: Moscow Rules apply. Uncleared former co-workers from Q-Division might conceivably be compromised by adversarial factions, and following the dissolution of SOE’s binding oath your Audit override cannot be guaranteed to work. You may assume CO clearance and membership for everyone assigned to GOD GAME INDIGO or PLAN TITANIC clearances prior to the organization’s dissolution, but not all PLAN TITANIC personnel are privy to the existence of GOD GAME INDIGO.

  Destroy this letter after you finish with it. After leaving work, you may go home and collect essentials for an absence of at least one week. Do not overpack or give any indication to an observer that you are not planning to return. Expenses will be covered for subsistence, accommodation, and replacement clothing. Once you are ready, identify and shed your tail (if any), then proceed to the designated safe house for GOD GAME INDIGO.

  Meeting tonight at 10 p.m., or when the gang’s all there.

  Good luck.

  * * *

  I leave the taxi driver slumped behind the wheel of his vehicle in a side street, then merge with the lunchtime crowds at the east end of King’s Road. It’s a routine matter to check for a tail—doubling in and out of a department store, around a block, down into the lobby of a Tube station, then up and out of the other exit. Doubtless I’m leaving a fat footprint all over the CCTV records, but they won’t start checking them until well after the taxi driver wakes up and I’ll be long gone by then.

  Of course, this assumes that the organization’s assets haven’t fallen into enemy hands already. My binding geas’s absence is a horrible sphincter-tightening hole in my defenses when I realize this. Oversight might have decided to burn me, but you don’t burn a senior officer, much less a designated Unique External Asset, trivially. More likely the undertow that sucked me down to the cells under Belgravia is the very edge of a cat-5 hurricane of enemy action. If we’re being attacked by the highest levels of government in a horrible kind of Civil Service autoimmune disease, if the enemy has uploaded my face to the basilisk guns of the national SCORPION STARE network, then my first warning is likely to come when I burst into flames like a magnesium flare and burn down to a human-shaped cinder in the middle of the pavement.

  I realize this as I walk the upper floor of a department store, checking mirrors for secret shoppers following me. But I also r
ealize that it’s unlikely at this stage, a rapid and drastic escalation. If they’re arresting and holding potential threats, then they’re assuming some degree of cooperation; they won’t switch to gunning agents down in the streets instantly. When they do … well, if I have sufficient warning there are countermeasures. On my way out I look thoughtfully at the cosmetics counters on the ground floor, wondering if they’ve got the basics for CV Dazzle. (It’s a set of makeup patterns designed to bamboozle computer vision systems—although they really don’t go with my current Gray Man suit-and-tie disguise: computers and humans recognize anomalies in entirely different ways, unfortunately.) But I’m not willing to half-kill a shop assistant and steal some face paint just on the off chance, so I slip my stolen ID badge into an inner pocket and slip out onto the street again, crossing my fingers and hoping I’m right about the escalation lag.

  My hair doesn’t catch fire as I amble along the side streets near Victoria, then double back towards Westminster with my hands in my pockets and my shirt glued to my back by a sheen of cold sweat, so I suppose I’m right. It’s even conceivable that the police haven’t realized I’m missing—nobody but Jo, the SA, and the custody sergeant knew I was meant to be in the secure cell, and Jo won’t be talking for a while—but I’m not betting on it.

  I walk for nearly an hour and my feet are beginning to ache—polished leather dress shoes feel like shit compared to my normal trainers or insole-padded combat boots—as I turn down a familiar tree-lined crescent and walk past Persephone’s front door. If I close my eyes it looks like a beacon of occult power, a giant T-shape with the upper floor spreading along the entire block to either side. I tense up and unleash my will to one side, rattling the wards on her front door. The returning zinger is painful even though I’m prepared for it, like having my forebrain stung by an angry cognitive wasp. I nearly stumble, but manage to recover and keep going. Nothing happens immediately so I walk on, then begin to work my way back around until I can pass her front door again. There’s no block pattern in central London, no rhythm or rhyme to the layout and geometry of streets, so it takes me about five minutes (and a couple of embarrassing dead-end cul-de-sac excursions) before I find myself there. And that’s when I realize I’ve picked up a tail, to my utter relief.

  “Wotcher, Bob.” Johnny falls into step a couple of paces behind me. He speaks quietly, casting his voice just above the background traffic noise. “Sitrep.”

  “Warrant card burned, arrest warrant out with the Met, broke out of Belgravia and need to go to ground. So how was your morning, Mr. McTavish?”

  “Fucking awful, mate, it’s not just you who’s having a bad day. ’Seph isn’t home, by the way: spot of bother with the boys from the Border Force, something about her permanent Leave to Remain being revoked and them wanting to haul her off to Yarl’s Wood for deportation to Serbia. You may imagine just how well that went down, especially on account of her actually being an Italian citizen hence not needing that paperwork to live here. Someone, we surmise, has been hacking government databases. Walk on and take the second left, Zero’ll be along in a sec and will pick you up. Don’t mind me, I’m just going to check yer arse for cling-ons.”

  Johnny stops following me abruptly, turning to check the pavement behind me for signs of a tail. I could tell him not to bother—I’ve been tasting the minds around me for the past half hour, they all have distinctive aromas and they’re all new since last time I came this way—but I humor him.

  Another couple of minutes of aimless dogshit dodging later, I’m walking past a somewhat less up-market row of town houses when a car pulls in ahead of me and pops the passenger door open. “Bob?” It’s Zero, Persephone’s butler, chauffeur, and somewhat spurious bodyguard. “Hop in.”

  I don’t even break stride. Moments later I’m belting myself in as Zero pulls away from the curb. It’s a boringly plain silver Peugeot hatchback, so down-market I’m astonished Persephone’s driver would be seen dead in it. “There’s a mask in the glove compartment. Put it on,” he tells me.

  I don’t need to be told twice: I open it and grab the horrible, floppy, rubbery Archie McPhee face—Ronald Reagan, if I’m not very much mistaken. “What the fuck.” I pull it on. “Mind telling me why?” I ask.

  “ANPR cameras also do face recognition these days,” he tells me. “We don’t want to burn the car.”

  “But what about—”

  “Relax, Bob, there’s a class five glamour on it to take care of the human factor. Now sit back and enjoy the ride or something. I’m taking you to see the boss lady…”

  * * *

  Mo doesn’t keep many personal effects in her office. Partly it’s that she’s only had an office in the New Annex for the past month, and partly because she doesn’t believe in mixing personal and public personas; as it is, there’s just a framed photo of her parents and sister, another of her husband, and a box of antihistamines. She scoops them all into her handbag along with the phone, card, and the SA’s letter, then pauses in the doorway to look back at the room for a moment.

  Which is when Mhari clears her throat.

  “What?” Mo turns. Mhari waits in the corridor, looking slightly lost, her boardroom shell cracked wide open by the cardboard box she holds in the crook of one elbow.

  “Mo? Can I have a word?”

  “Sure. Come right in; my door is open.” Mo chuckles wearily and leads her back inside. It feels very unsettling to sit down in her office chair again, so soon after having steeled herself to stand and leave it for the last time. “Is it about…”

  Mhari makes eye contact as she takes the visitor chair, smoothing her skirt over her knees neatly. A sign of tension, Mo realizes. “Yes.” Mhari’s face is expressionless, a white doll-mask with crimson lip gloss and perfect wingtip eyeliner hiding the vulnerable skin beneath, but Mo sees the underlying tension, a steel cable wound so tight it’s close to snapping in a whiplash of mayhem that will slice through the flesh and blood of anyone who gets in its way. “About that.”

  Mo bites her lower lip. “When did you last feed?” she asks. She’s proud of herself for being able to ask without hesitation or any sign of fear. She doesn’t even bother to scribe the glyph of protection unseen below the edge of her desk, because she trusts Mhari implicitly to a degree that would have been impossible a year ago.

  “Friday.” Mhari shrugs. “I can go a while. But the others…” She shakes her head. “No idea, frankly. And that worries me.”

  “Did HR say anything about continuity of support for OPERA CAPE personnel?” Mo asks, then freezes as she registers Mhari’s expression. “Oh dear.”

  “I might be spooking at nothing. For all I know provisions are already in place.” Mhari glances towards the shuttered window. “But I haven’t been told, and this isn’t just a personal crisis. If they haven’t made provision for Janice or Dick or John, that’s bad enough. But what about Alex and the Host’s magi? What are they feeding them?”

  “Alex can keep All-Highest in line, and All-Highest can—” Mo stops dead as her brain catches up with her mouth. The situation in the camp on Dartmoor is delicate. Three thousand surrendered alfär warriors and their servants and dependents sitting in a barbed-wire circle surrounded by tanks are one thing—especially once they’ve been disarmed and bound by geas not to fight back—but alfär magi are PHANGs by any other name, and far less tractable. The alfär traditionally controlled them by a combination of castration and religious indoctrination, but Mo can’t begin to guess what will happen when the blood thirst rises and threatens to overwhelm them. The problem with feeding PHANGs is that the blood needs to come from a live donor, and the V-parasites use it as a bridge to the victim’s brain, which they rapidly chew into the lacy wreckage associated with death through V syndrome dementia. The Laundry arranged for a hospice to supply their half-dozen PHANG employees with blood from terminally ill patients whose lives won’t be substantially shortened, but the alfär magi are used to a rich diet of healthy brains. “What have they
been doing?”

  Mhari’s cheek twitches. “When the Host surrendered, there were a number of slaves who had already been tapped, but not used up. That was three weeks ago, and they’re already almost gone. According to the last memo I saw the crisis was going to become acute by the end of this week.”

  “Do you have any suggestions?” Mo asks tonelessly.

  “Do I…?” Mhari’s eyes glow red for an instant before she forces herself to sit back. She laughs shakily as her irises fade back to their pale turquoise baseline. “Nothing good. Cycling PHANGs into storage in a time-frozen containment grid would work, but you’re not going to get many volunteers; all it takes is one bigot with a grudge and a flashgun and that’s it. It’d be like being handed a life sentence in solitary confinement with no fixed duration, only worse. Even John has something he calls a life—parents, a room he rents, that kind of thing. But there’s worse. Alex.

  “He’s out there in the camp keeping Cassie under control, and she’s out there in the camp holding down the Host, and as long as he was a sworn member of Q-Division that was fine because he was an agent of the government and there was a clear line of authority back to the Crown. But if they’ve absentmindedly fired him along with the rest of us—”

  “Oh fuck.”

  “You said it.” Mhari stands wearily. “It’s like what happened in Iraq after the invasion, when the American occupation government fired the entire army and the police without bothering to disarm them or asking what they’d do.”

  Mo surprises herself by standing and, as Mhari pushes herself up, preparing to leave, she hugs her. “You take care,” she says, looking Mhari in the eye. “I mean that.”