The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  There is a bang, so loud that it’s more like having my head slammed in a door than anything I can call a noise. There is also a blinding flash of light. I fall over, clutching Lecter as I go down, and a couple of pairs of size fifty hobnailed boots run past my shoulder. Through the cotton wool haze in my head I hear shouting, a piercing scream, and the flat bang of pistol fire. “Stop! Police! You’re under arrest!” booms a voice the size of an aircraft carrier. Oh great, I think, dazedly, Officer Friendly saves the day. For my part I’m trying to stay out of the way because I’m on the ground and I’ll get myself damaged if I get in the way of the ruck that’s just thundered past me into the document store —

  A hand grabs my shoulder. “Dr. O’Brien! Are you all right?”

  I open my eyes and see Mhari leaning over me. She looks extremely pissed off. Maybe thirty seconds have passed, but it feels like an hour.

  “Flash-bang?” I ask haltingly. My ears are ringing and purple-green after-images dance in front of my eyes.

  “Yes.” She stands, then grabs me by one hand and hauls me onto my feet. I manage to lean against the wall as I unwrap myself from around Lecter. I’ll have new bruises tomorrow, but I kept him safe. “You’re late,” she says coldly to somebody standing out of view behind my shoulder. I use the seconds to try and pull myself together.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” Officer Friendly dials his voice back down to normal: “There are shooters at large.”

  “Yes, well.” I force myself to stand on my own feet, albeit unsteadily. “What they came for is in here.”

  “How do you” – the blank metal face turns to me – “know?”

  I raise Lecter. ***Come on, if you think you’re hard enough,*** the violin taunts him silently: I don’t give voice to the words.

  “Jim, we’re from the Laundry, it’s our job to know.” Because we’re an intelligence agency, and how much intelligence do you need to figure out that if a Mad Scientist sends their minions to rob a library, they’re more likely to be going after a rare manuscript than last month’s issue of Homes and Gardens. The shouting and banging has moved away: Lecter shows me a cluster of dots, dimming as they disappear down another corridor that opens onto the far side of this archive room because, silly me, of course you’d design more than one exit onto a conservation store full of priceless and potentially combustible manuscripts. And if you think the police are coming in through the front, you throw a flash-bang at them by way of distraction before you leg it out through the back. “They’re getting away,” I add.

  “I don’t see how,” Officer Friendly says tersely, then clams up, obviously sucked into another round of radio comms with his colleagues. “Oh. Follow me, at the double; it’s kicking off upstairs again.”

  He doesn’t wait but pounds away back the way we came like a baby tyrannosaur in cast-iron clogs. Mhari and I trail along in his stompy wake, followed by a forlorn gaggle of officers who couldn’t keep up with the escaping furball as Freudstein’s minions beat a fighting retreat from the archives.

  As we arrive in the lobby a deafeningly loud helicopter roars overhead, so low that it almost scrapes the steeply pitched upper roof and elevator tower of the museum. It’s big and fast, and as it circles to hover over the flat roof of the Center for Conservation, tiny figures scramble through the windows overlooking the flat deck and rush towards it.

  “Shit.” I shouldn’t swear in front of employees but right now I find I don’t care about setting a good example. Besides, everybody else is thinking it.

  “The roof won’t take it!” Mhari exclaims excitedly. It’s almost as if she wants to see a disaster.

  “I don’t think they’re planning on staying for a picnic,” I tell her. Officer Friendly dashes through the lobby and lifts off like a rocket, then circles around the helicopter: but for some reason he keeps his distance. A moment later I hear more gunfire and flinch. They’re shooting at Jim! For some reason this makes me much angrier than the flash-bang earlier or the unaimed fire when the police gained entrance – almost as angry as the desecration of the national institution we’re approaching.

  The smell of smoke is strong. We keep well back behind the police line, but the awning over the building blocks off our view of the drama unfolding on the rooftop as the pitch of the helicopter’s engine winds up. Where are they? I ask Lecter.

  ***They? You mean your prey?*** He still sounds mildly amused.

  Yes, them —

  He shows me: pale red dots now, visible through the glassy outline of the walls as they scramble roofwards. ***Mine,*** he says eagerly.

  Not yours.

  ***Not them, fool: what they took.***

  Wait, what – I clamp down on it. Some questions are best not asked in the presence of the pale violin. Whatever Freudstein wanted, he’s got: I’ll learn what’s missing tomorrow, when Lecter is safely back in his box and the staff have had time to comb through the wreckage. I hold the violin at the ready, braced against my shoulder, and line up on the rooftop: then I shiver in the grip of an adrenaline-driven cold sweat as I realize that I could take down the chopper – but then what?

  Decisions. At least six heavily armed bad guys just stole a national treasure, and they’re getting away. ***I can take them,*** Lecter tells me, chillingly assured.

  Yes, but then the chopper would crash. And I have this vision of four or five tons of metal and jet fuel raining down on the national library of record’s rare document collection, of the deaths of everybody on board – at least six people – and possibly of officers on the ground, and the loss of whatever they stole besides. It just doesn’t bear thinking about. I can’t force the chopper down and resolve the situation safely: all Agent CANDID can do is destroy everybody on board and escalate a clusterfuck into a catastrophe. Stand down.

  I shakily force myself to lower Lecter, then unsling the violin case and re-inter him. He buzzes his frustration in the key of a million flies as I latch the lid. Then I watch from the shadows of the broken building frontage as the chopper hovers over the rooftop and the robbers climb aboard.

  I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole situation: it stinks. Jim might be able to track the chopper – more likely it’s a job for Air Traffic Control and an RAF fighter will already be inbound to intercept it. But if this is Freudstein, we’re talking about the criminal mastermind who robbed the Bank of England. He’ll have contingency plans in hand. He’ll have anticipated the prompt dispatch of a pair of Typhoons, and if I gambled I’d bet serious money that by the time they scream in from the QRA line at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire – which is ten minutes away, because they’re unable to go supersonic on full afterburner without breaking half the windows in North London – the helicopter will be nowhere to be found.

  The chopper turns and thunders away, the pounding of its blades setting up a matching echo in my skull, which is still aching from the flash-bang and the mental exertion of keeping Lecter from going on a killing spree. Once it’s out of sight I shuffle back into the atrium, to look at the gigantic display cabinet and the other cases where documents of national significance are laid before the public. The lighting in here is dim even in daytime, to avoid damaging the delicate treasures stored under glass in humidity-controlled cabinets. The main display may be badly damaged but the cabinet on the mezzanine landing is intact, and I take a shuddering breath of relief as I look at one of the two surviving copies of the Magna Carta on public view, the eight-hundred-year-old foundational document of our system of government. Someone clears their throat. I glance sideways: it’s Mhari.

  “Look,” she says, pointing (with a finger that I am gratified to see is wobbling just a little: I’m not the only one who’s outside her comfort zone tonight). Then I follow her direction and my stomach clenches.

  The glass is intact and the precious manuscript is undamaged. But, positioned proudly on top of it like a brash intrusion from another era, is another of Freudstein’s calling cards. He’s thumbing his nose at us now: Look what I could have
taken if I’d wanted it!

  This is going to be a very long night…

  8: UNAVOIDABLE CONSEQUENCES

  The next morning I head for the office early – still yawning: I was up past midnight being checked out by paramedics, then filling out incident reports – then pull my emergency meeting suit out of its carrier and head round to the New Annex. I’ve been summoned by the Auditors: happy joy. It’s not just the SA, in his capacity as chair of the INCORRIGIBLE committee, but the Auditors as a committee, sitting en banc. The report on Agent CANDID’s encounter with Strip Jack Spratt has collided with a copy of the fatal accident report that is climbing its way up the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s in tray and butted heads with yesterday’s fracas at the library. We still don’t have a complete list of what went stolen or missing in the raid – Freudstein’s people made a comprehensive mess out of the main display in the atrium and did a real number on several archives, and were working over the rare music manuscripts when I interrupted them – but the Auditors want to hear from me in person even in the absence of a full report. This is quite worrying because it suggests the organization as a whole may be going into damage-control mode.

  They’ve cleared one of the larger offices on the top floor – one of the Mahogany Row offices – and rolled out the resonant carpet. I wait in the receptionist’s office until I’m summoned, trying not to succumb to anticipatory collywobbles. I’ve been so busy lately that this almost seemed like a trivial irritation at first; certainly, after being carpeted by the COBRA subcommittee and then the Home Secretary, I’m becoming inured to high-level grilling. But you can’t ignore the Auditors. They’re the front line of our operational oversight system: if you run an organization that gives people like me extraordinary (and lethal) occult powers, you need investigators with similar skills to keep them on the straight and narrow. And their powers to compel and control are themselves extraordinary, and potentially lethal.

  “Dr. O’Brien, if you’d please come in?” The secretary to the Audit Committee sticks her head round the door and gives me a sympathetic smile.

  I stand up and enter. There are five of them, sitting behind a table with seating for six. The empty chair is telling. Judith, I think, with a pang.

  “Good morning,” says Dr. Armstrong. His colleagues nod affably.

  “Hello,” I say, somewhat nervously.

  “If you’d like to take a seat?” asks the man to the SA’s right. His accent has a faintly musical lilt: not one I recognize. He’s a distinguished looking fellow in late middle-age, possibly with Jamaican ancestry; his beard is bushy and mostly white.

  “Um.” There’s a wooden chair in the middle of the grid woven into the carpet. “Thanks.” I walk across to it and sit down. My buttocks tense as if I’m taking a seat in Old Sparky.

  “Let’s keep this simple, shall we?” asks the woman sitting to the left of Judith’s empty chair. Middle-aged, mousy and inoffensive, she’s probably capable of zapping me into a pile of smoldering cinders if she takes a dislike to me. “Dr. O’Brien” – she looks at me, and as I meet her gaze and fall into her infinitely dark pupils I lose contact with my body – “did you deliberately kill Strip Jack Spratt, also known as Dougal Slaithwaite, in the cells under Belgravia Police Station last Thursday?”

  “No.” My tongue is chokingly large and made of dry leather, dusty as the tomb. I can no more stop it wagging than I can stop my heart beating. “I was unaware of the significance of his medical condition until it was too late.”

  My interrogator nods. The SA looks relaxed as he asks the next question: “Do you believe he was working for Professor Freudstein?”

  “That seems probable – although I believe Mr. Slaithwaite might not have fully understood what he was doing.”

  The auditors glance at each other. “Told you so,” murmurs the man on the SA’s right.

  More questions follow, as they piece together a detailed time line of the events in Trafalgar Square – then probe my awareness of the unpleasantness at the Bank of England, and finally walk me through my recollection of yesterday’s events at the British Library. Then: “Do you have any other suspicions?” asks Dr. Armstrong.

  “M-maybe.” My traitor tongue is hesitant? In front of the Auditors? I nearly go cross-eyed in disbelief, despite the powerful geas that alienates me from control of my own body.

  “What do you mean maybe?” The woman sitting at the far right end of the table leans forward intently. She’s nearly as striking as Mhari, but entirely human. She has long black hair and is somewhat Middle-Eastern looking, seemingly younger than I am – although you can never be certain among the DSSs of Mahogany Row. “What do you —”

  “Wait, Seph,” says the other woman. “Let her —”

  I somehow manage to lick my dry lips. “I’m not sure and I don’t want to prejudice your investigations. Suspicions not related to the killing. No obvious causal chain. But there’s something odd about the staff assignments to the Transhuman Policy Coordination Unit. Something smells funny.”

  Dr. Armstrong smiles. “Good,” he says. “If you’ll excuse me” – he turns to his colleagues – “we have addressed the core concern, have we not? If you don’t mind, I would like to discuss Dr. O’Brien’s other concerns with her under her own volition rather than under compulsion, in my capacity as operational oversight supervisor for the INCORRIGIBLE committee.”

  “Why don’t you want us to —” Seph seems to want to grill me further, but the SA won’t let her. He turns positively waspish, in fact.

  “You know perfectly well that once you start digging for information under compulsion, trying to find evidence to support a hypothesis, you will find it every time! Even if it’s the wrong hypothesis in the first place. I would prefer to rely on Dr. O’Brien’s freely given cooperation.” His smile vanishes. “Why don’t you, Persephone? Don’t you trust her?”

  She crosses her arms. “Very well, have it your own way.” She’s obviously annoyed with him about something but I have no idea what, and it’s perilously far above my pay grade to speculate. Chalk it up to hitherto unexplained politics among the Auditors, throw salt over your shoulder, and move on.

  “End testimony,” incants the mousy-looking woman. Directly, to me: “You may leave the grid now, Dr. O’Brien.”

  I feel as if invisible fetters have just evaporated from my hands and feet. I take a deep breath, as I stand up: “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank us.” She nods affably. “Your oath of office simply verified that you cleared yourself.”

  The SA stands up and walks across the room: he holds the door open for me. I emerge blinking into the daylight, feeling shaky and a little numb. More formerly solid pieces of my life are crumbling into fragments. Everything is spinning out of control. It is not a sensation I am remotely at ease with.

  After my session with the Audit Committee I take a long lunch break while I pull myself together, then head over to a police station to give a statement about last night’s excitement, then back to the office to chip away at the paperwork mountain. And I’m still there at seven o’clock in the evening when my desk phone rings.

  “You’ve got to come home,” says Bob: “Spooky needs you.”

  “But I don’t need Spooky.”

  It’s seven o’clock and everyone but me and Mhari have gone home. I told them all not to bother coming in before noon tomorrow unless they feel like it. They’re still catching their breath from the weekend madness, and I’m playing catch-up from the weekend, the Home Office grilling, and an exciting visit to the library. It feels as if I’m drowning in work, but it can’t wait. Right now I’m paging through a list of rare music manuscripts that are missing from a certain archive, trying to figure out if there’s anything here that might give us a handle on Freudstein’s goals or interests —

  Bob sounds distressed: “They’re sending me away tomorrow!”

  “What?” Does not compute. Suddenly I find myself paying complete attention to the
phone call. “What do you mean?”

  “I have to go up to Dunwich. Angleton ran a lab there for dangerous experiments of some kind and they need me to defuse the defensive wards. It might be an overnight trip, but having seen what he did to his office, it could easily take me the rest of the week.”

  Work can wait. “Where are you now?” I ask.

  “In the kitchen.”

  Oh damn. “This long-distance telephone tag is no good,” I tell him. I hit “save” on the laptop, leaving the list of stolen manuscripts for later. (Judging by what his minions took, Freudstein must really like obscure nineteenth-century violin pieces.) “How about I come round? Do you want to call for a carry-out?” Hope begins to rise. “I know you’re scared of L – the violin, but I figured out a way to secure it overnight.”

  “Let’s do that,” he says after a pause. “Make a formal date of it?”

  A date? In my own home, with my own husband? How strange: something about his offer makes me shiver, but in a nice way. “Yes, let’s do that.”

  “Love you,” he says, as if he needs reassurance.

  “Love you, too, dear. I’ll be about an hour.”

  It takes me ten minutes to prepare my suitcase, grab my violin, and lock up the office. Mhari looks up as I pass her open door. “What’s up?” she asks.

  I show her some teeth: “I’ve got a home to go to. See you tomorrow.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Don’t you want to see the list of what Freudstein grabbed?” She looks affronted. “I pulled in favors to get this report, Mo —”

  “Oh.” Wait. “Is that the same list I got three hours ago? Because if —”

  “Nope.” She turns her laptop so that the screen points my way. “This is what Officer Friendly sent round fifteen minutes ago. They eliminated duplicates and struck off a lot of items that got thrown on the floor when Freudstein went through, and we’re down to about fifty possible primary targets and maybe two hundred other items. But.” She flashes me a feral grin: “I asked the archivists at Dansey House to cross-reference them against our classification index.”