The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  But it turns out that we’re not actually required to be loyal to the government of the day, to the Crown-in-Parliament: we’re loyal to the person of the monarch.

  Which is why Continuity Operations was able to so easily ignore the dissolution order issued by the Cabinet Office, drop a new oath on everybody, and carry on as if the agency was still authorized to exist.

  And I think you can guess where this is going. It’s going to be a wild roller-coaster ride: better hang onto your hat!

  * * *

  By midnight, the reception at Nether Stowe House is in full fling. While Cassie was taking a five-minute toilet break it surged past raucous, and as she exits the below-stairs quarters with a new drinks tray—this one loaded with vodka martinis—she finds the party well on the way to orgiastic excess.

  A younger, glitzier crowd arrived after the capital’s more of-the-moment venues closed for the night. They’re bright young things with connections to the older and wealthier fixers Schiller invited as his primary guests: trust fund kids and heirs to family fortunes, here to party and not ashamed to let it all hang out. They’re less likely to grope but more inclined to stumble drunkenly into Cassie’s path, forcing her to swerve: servants are simply part of the furniture. She’s expended all her bugs now, but she can’t leave until her shift ends at three o’clock. “Schiller is going to throw at least two more of these gala evenings,” Mr. Howard told her during the briefing the day before. “We really need you inside all of them, if possible. I know it’s a tough job: can you do it?”

  Should have said no, shouldn’t I? she tells herself as she reaches the side table in the Ballroom and starts methodically swapping full glasses for empties. Too late now.

  The band has packed up for the night, leaving a sound system playing old eighties synthpop hits, and the air smells of sweat and weed. She’s just finishing with her tray when something catches her attention. An older man with immaculately coiffed silver hair walks past her, chatting over his shoulder to another fellow, portly and balding, with a nose that bespeaks a fondness for spirits. “… don’t care if it’s proving difficult to find a workaround,” the silver-haired man is saying, “I need them available as soon as possible, in this country, regardless of how you go about the import arrangements. Tell Major Riley if you encounter any difficulties, logistics is his speciality…”

  The fine hairs on the back of Cassie’s neck rise, but not because of his words: the silver-haired male reeks of mana, and as she turns her inner eye on him she sees huge reserves of thaumic power bound at the cardinal points of his body, at heart and tongue and crotch. It has the same subtly unclean taste-feel-look to it as McGuigan’s. He walks past Cassie, deep in conversation with his colleague, and she pretends not to notice, focusing on her tray—but she notes the direction his feet take, and feels a sharp pang of regret for having spent her last listening tag on a random piece of glassware. “Yes sir, Mr. Schiller,” says the fat man, “I’ll get them here in plenty of time, don’t you worry. There’ll be enough hosts to go round when you need them.”

  Cassie shakes her head, then follows the pair at a discreet distance. They head towards the west wing of the building, at ground level, approaching a door marked PRIVATE. Cassie approaches it, steeling herself—

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Cassie startles, nearly shedding her load but getting it under control herself at the last second. It’s Ms. McGuigan.

  “Lisa said to collect all the empty glasses,” she says artlessly, “I thought…”

  “You don’t go in there.” McGuigan’s tone is chilly. “Leave that area alone. I’ll arrange for it to be cleaned. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, miss.” Cassie bobs in place, avoiding the woman’s eyes. “Where should I—”

  But the security supervisor is already off, heading up the main staircase. That was close, Cassie thinks. The PRIVATE doors are off-limits to hired help? Mr. Howard will be interested, she decides as she turns to take her tray back to the kitchen, paying no attention to the pair of discreet CCTV camera balls overlooking the entrance to the off-limits area of the west wing.

  * * *

  “Yes, but what is he doing in those back rooms?” demands the Senior Auditor.

  We’re in a no-shit formal meeting of the GOD GAME INDIGO management team, convening in a safe house I’ve never visited before and will never see again.

  “I can make a guess,” I say. “So Schiller’s spraying cash like there’s no tomorrow. And there’s the matter of these new leech-things he’s come up with, and it’s pretty clear he’s got something to do with the Cabinet Office decision to shut down the agency. But what about the business contacts from other industries? And the bright young things? Is there something more to this? Because it goes beyond that DELIRIUM playbook the Comstocks leaked to us.”

  “Stop speculating, Bob,” Persephone tells me. “Unless you’ve got anything concrete—Doctor?”

  Dr. Armstrong shakes his head. “Bob’s right in that it goes beyond simply shutting down a rival agency. This has got to be some sort of major power play. His burn rate is unsustainable, and that’s the smoking gun. The question is, what kind of power play is it? He’s already in a good position to mop up a hugely lucrative outsourcing deal and replace the agency. But is he after political power, or something else? Could he be piloting an endgame run for the Sleeper in the UK rather than on his home ground?”

  We’re sitting in a hunched-over circle inside a temporary summoning grid that has locked us into an isolated pocket universe of our own for an hour, a camping lantern on a tripod in the middle providing lighting. The glow of LEDs gives everybody a weirdly washed-out, bleached appearance, underlit with the tops of heads in shadow. It’s just the SA, Persephone, me, and Mo this time around. Vikram’s fighting administrative fires—money laundering rules make it surprisingly hard to boot up a small covert agency without anyone noticing, even if you’ve got access to the House of Lords black budget—Mhari is keeping Alex out of trouble and riding herd on Cassie—an unenviable job—and Boris is running the monitoring suite upstairs from Schiller’s city apartment.

  “Let’s see.” Mo flips open the paper organizer she’s carrying around and consults her notes. “He’s on the hook for a million and a half so far for the use of Nether Stowe House. Based on the contract caterers’ invoices it looks like he’s paying just under three hundred thousand for each party—but that’s just the official entertainments budget; the hookers and blow probably cost twice as much on top.” Her lower lip curls in concentration. “Two so far, another planned for next week, it’s ridiculous—if he kept it up for a year his spend would exceed fifty million quid on partying. Let’s see. Add another fourteen thousand a week for the Docklands apartment, and ten thousand for personal transport—three armored luxury limos, helicopter on call to the tune of eight flying hours per week, plus drivers and flight crew—yes, this is all petty cash by Schiller’s standards, but it adds up. Salary and wages for his entourage: he has at least three senior female PAs and four male bodyguards or minders with him. Plus the chauffeurs. As he brought them with him they’re presumably members of his Church, but even so, on American pay scales, ten bodies plus payroll overheads adds up to at least another eight thousand a week.”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Armstrong says heavily. “He’s blowing between five and ten million pounds on wild parties this month.”

  Persephone has been scribbling notes on a legal pad. Now she taps the cap of her pen against her teeth pensively. “How much is Golden Promise Ministries worth? And the GP Services subsidiary?”

  “Not enough,” says my wife. She flips pages rapidly. “We got our hands on their last filed accounts. They’re both privately held organizations but his Church is a 501(c)(3) body, income-tax exempt—we had to pull strings, but the Treasury were remarkably helpful—Golden Promise Ministries reported gross income of about forty-eight million dollars a year. Their subsidiaries are more interesting: GP Services actually made a loss
in 2012, but it’s an artificial loss, they would have been in profit to the tune of seventeen million dollars if they hadn’t plowed it into, uh, ‘business development’ and some heavy real estate and capital expenditure acquisitions. Like that Gulfstream Schiller flies around in.” She frowns in distaste. “Gross turnover was two hundred and sixty-nine million dollars in 2012. There are some other activities—Schiller runs a talk radio station and a cable TV channel, all firewalled from the rest of the business because media outlets are subject to regulatory scrutiny—and then there’s some stuff the Treasury people couldn’t get us. A couple of business units with their own limited-liability setup and some sort of federal contract.”

  Persephone whistles quietly. “All right. Call it three hundred and fifty million dollars a year in turnover, and the black budget. That will be cost-plus if he’s subcontracting for the Black Chamber. Why is that not sufficient, Michael?”

  “Because.” Dr. Armstrong crosses one leg over the other and laces his fingers around his knee. “How do you spend ten million dollars a month on entertainment on income of three hundred and fifty a year, without it damaging the rest of your business empire? It’s thirty percent of gross turnover! Obviously you can’t do that: it’s a short-term strategy. He can afford to do it for a month or two, maybe three, but he can’t keep it up indefinitely. So, let’s work it through. If he’s greasing palms in order to win outsourcing contracts from the new ministry, he’s doing it too early. The temporary agency MOD is provisioning next week per order in council is a holding action. It’ll take nine months to draft a proper legislative framework, rush it through committee, and get the new portfolio established. Even with the usual large government contracting agencies handling things at our end and Schiller plugging his GP Security people into them as specialist subcontractors. If he’s here to grab a chunk of our work, he should be planning for a long haul, one to two years. So he’s running a short-term plan, people, and he’s going to reach the payoff soon. Which means it has to be something huge enough to justify that level of expenditure, that pays off really fast.”

  “There are other loose ends,” Persephone adds in the silence. “Why his people tried to snatch Bob off the streets. And the attempt on Cassie and Alex. The new parasites, the segmented worms.”

  “They’re like nothing of his I’ve seen before,” I add, shuddering. “And how did he come back from the Temple on the Pyramid? He’s supposed to have died there. The gate was closed. He shouldn’t be here at all.”

  Mo speculates: “Let me take a stab at it? Schiller Mark One was a charismatic evangelical preacher. He’s still running the Church but he’s not so visible on air these days and he’s not throwing any stadium events. So he’s not looking for broad grassroots public support and outreach. Instead he’s making lots of friends among the point-one-percenters, he’s hobnobbing with MPs and Cabinet Office insiders and providing hookers and blow to the elite.”

  Persephone joins in. “These parties. Two so far, another next week. I’ve met Schiller. Before the Pyramid he was a true believer: he believed in saving souls from the fiery pit. But he’s also a, a moralist. A quiverful dispensationalist Christian, just with some extra baggage. If Ms. Brewer’s report is remotely accurate the parties are swimming in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Isn’t this a doctrinal contradiction? I could see him as he used to be, hiring a Christian rock band and having lots of wholesome young Church members to encourage his guests to come to Jesus—his version of Jesus, sleeping in a tomb on a dead alien planet—but this is all wrong. I can’t believe this is the same person. Something has reoriented his moral compass.”

  “The Sleeper,” I say baldly. “That’s got to be the answer to how he came back here and it’s probably the reason he’s behaving like this now.”

  The SA looks at me intently. “Explain your reasoning,” he says.

  “Gut feeling: our man exhibits behavior type A, goes somewhere weird, returns, and exhibits behavior type B, where B and A are, on the face of it, incompatible. If he was a teenager having a crisis of faith I might credit it, but Schiller’s a middle-aged, wealthy Church elder. He’s thoroughly invested in his worldview. People like that don’t bend, much less do a U-turn: they stick to their path or they break. Ergo, whatever is in Schiller’s head isn’t Schiller anymore. At a minimum it’s Schiller-plus.”

  “We need to know what’s going on around the Pyramid,” Persephone says, her lack of enthusiasm for this chore glaringly obvious. Not that I blame her. Visiting the tomb of the Sleeper in the Pyramid is on my bucket list of things to do before I die, right between holding a tea party inside the sarcophagus at Chernobyl and infecting myself with Ebola Zaire. “Is the Squadron available…?”

  “Not flying this year,” Dr. Armstrong says shortly, “our ground crew got laid off.”

  I can’t contain myself: “Oh great, that’s just peachy. We spent how many hundreds of millions back in the late seventies acquiring a top secret aviation capability and now it’s grounded because they can’t top up the brake fluid and lube? What is the world coming to?”

  “They were on the books under the Nimrod MRA4 program,” the SA reminds me. “And look what happened to that.” I nod. Unhappy but true: the MRA4 upgrade program was summarily scrapped during the 2010 strategic defense and security review because of “cost overruns.” Ahem, that wasn’t us, there were no witnesses, you can’t prove it, mate … but if it means the White Elephants are grounded while the MOD hunts behind the sofa cushions for pocket change to keep them ticking over, we’re stuffed. “And anyway, high-altitude reconnaissance overflights are beside the point at this time, given that the Sleeper is clearly active to some extent.”

  “Someone’s going to have to walk over there and poke it with a stick. And this time, it’s not going to be me,” Persephone adds.

  “Me neither!” I squeak.

  “Stop derailing.” Mo gives me one of her more repressive stares as she continues. “Schiller came back, and he’s got some sort of short-term goal that justifies pointing a firehose of money at making friends and influencing people right now. To say nothing of these horrible parasite worm-things. What if the attack on the agency is misdirection—”

  “It’ll be a Plan B,”’Seph interjects.

  “A Plan B, then his Plan A is an even higher priority. And we have to disrupt it at any cost because we’re dealing with a proxy for the Sleeper, and if the Sleeper is playing an endgame we are in deep trouble.”

  The SA rubs his forehead. “Dr. O’Brien, do I understand that you’re proposing we should go full Watergate on this?”

  For a moment my wife looks incredibly uncomfortable. But then her face sets in a mulish expression, almost harsh, and I shiver: this is the Mo whose pieces I used to pick up after jobs gone wrong, the increasingly brittle face of a nightmare hunter. “This is already a black operation, isn’t it? Because of the findings about the…” She inclines her head in Dr. Armstrong’s direction.

  “What?” I ask.

  He smiles that saintly, terrifying smile of his at me, and says, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

  I glare. “I hear your Wittgenstein and I raise you one Alfred Korzybski: the map is not—”

  “Boys!” Persephone snorts loudly. “Dr. Armstrong, please stop patronizing Bob. Bob, there’s”—her eyes flicker to take in both Auditors—“a sandbox, and you’re in it. Because somebody has to come out of this without blood on their hands.” She glances sidelong at Mo. “Oh yes, while I remember: we need to talk later. In private,” she adds, with a look back at me.

  I’m about to ask about what but then what she said a moment earlier breaks through: I shudder, cold sweat breaking out in the small of my back, and do a double take. “But there’s plenty of blood on my—already—” I stop and look at ’Seph. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” She nods. Jesus, she’s serious. “More blood than a tank crew or a couple of hit teams?” And she’s got something to talk to Mo about without me around? />
  She nods again. “We’re irrevocably compromised, Bob. When the SA took direct control over this operation his impartial status as an Auditor was thereby compromised, the whole of Audit is compromised, Continuity Ops is a rogue team working on our own blind intuition without effective oversight—”

  Dr. Armstrong shrugs. “Some knowledge is inherently corrupting,” he says forebodingly. “And there are things you don’t need to know. You might speculate about why the Black Chamber chose to run the operation described in the DELIRIUM briefing against the Comstocks at this time, for example. Just don’t talk about it, because I can’t give you any answers.”

  “Should I even be here?” I ask the lantern despairingly.

  “Yes,” says the SA. “I assume full responsibility, Mr. Howard. You’re just along for the ride.” He comes to a decision. “I want you to go away and talk to Ms. Murphy, Dr. Schwartz, Ms. Brewer, Mr. Choudhury, and the rest of the nonexec team. I want you to draw up an action plan. During the next reception Schiller throws at Nether Stowe House, I want simultaneous searches of Schiller’s apartment and his corporate HQ out at Heathrow. I want us to get people into the off-limits area of the mansion to find out what he’s doing that’s worth spending a million pounds an hour on that he doesn’t want us to see, and I want to disrupt it.”

  “But I can’t be in three places at once!”

  “Tough,” says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. “You’re management now; isn’t it time you learned to delegate?”

  * * *

  So the SA has cast the dice and determined that we’re going to disrupt Schiller’s scheme—whatever it is—by hitting him from three directions at once; and that I, in the absence of full information about what the SA suspects Schiller is up to, am going to come up with an operational plan and manage this clusterfuck-in-the-making on the basis of what I suspect Schiller is up to (which is clearly No Good).